


daft pretty boys

by adhdjess (lesbiankavinsky)



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M, M/M, Past Child Abuse, Slow Burn, Trans Character, and here are your content warnings which i'm sure will be added to as we go:, genderqueer trans guy rory, just some gays trying to survive college, trans guy jess, you know how it is
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-08-19
Packaged: 2019-06-01 10:15:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15140924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbiankavinsky/pseuds/adhdjess
Summary: The longest conversation they’ve ever had was when Rory cornered Jess in the cafeteria and tried to get him to join a trans student group and Jess had tried to figure out the most polite way to say that he would rather eat a live grenade than discuss his gender in any context other than a one-on-one conversation with a close and trusted friend. He had wanted to find a polite way of saying it because Rory is cute, even if he seems remarkably uptight. Now, at the meeting, he has multiple pens of different colors lined up next to his notebook. Jess doesn’t even have the pocket-sized memo pad and ballpoint he usually has stuffed in some pocket. He wonders what it’s like to be so put-together that you actually take notes at a bullshit 8am meeting. Probably, he thinks, knocking back the end of his first mug of tea and starting on the second one, it’s all a sign of deep internal disorganization.





	1. Chapter 1

Jess has spent a lot of his college career thinking _I don’t want to be here_. Still, he isn’t sure he’s ever thought it with more energy and fervor than now, on his way to this 8am meeting on a Saturday. Despite his terrible attendance record, college has taught him a few things -- for example, that it’s possible to make friends who he loves so much that, for their sake, he’ll wake up at the ungodly hour of 7:45 and show up for a meeting of representatives from various LGBT groups on campus -- a meeting that will no doubt be long, boring, and full of people he hates. Jess hadn’t expected to find his people at college but, then, he hadn’t expected to find a club for gay socialists. It’s only six people and it meets in the slightly moldy basement of a freshman dorm, but it exists and for that, Jess is eternally grateful. They’ve been taking it in turn to go to these meetings and this is Jess’ week so he’s here -- unshaven and carrying two mugs of black coffee, but here.

He arrives about ten minutes late, halfway through one of the mugs of tea and takes the only available seat at the table, next to Rory Gilmore, who looks extremely irritated. Jess has had a few classes with Rory and, being serially tardy when he isn’t absent, is used to getting glared at by him. The longest conversation they’ve ever had was when Rory cornered Jess in the cafeteria and tried to get him to join a trans student group and Jess had tried to figure out the most polite way to say that he would rather eat a live grenade than discuss his gender in any context other than a one-on-one conversation with a close and trusted friend. He had wanted to find a polite way of saying it because Rory is cute, even if he seems remarkably uptight. Now, at the meeting, he has multiple pens of different colors lined up next to his notebook. Jess doesn’t even have the pocket-sized memo pad and ballpoint he usually has stuffed in some pocket. He wonders what it’s like to be so put-together that you actually take notes at a bullshit 8am meeting. Probably, he thinks, knocking back the end of his first mug of tea and starting on the second one, it’s all a sign of deep internal disorganization.

Jess spends most of the meeting daydreaming and trying not to fall asleep and slowly unravelling one of his socks (he’d put his foot up on the table but Rory had glared so insistently that he moved to rest it on his knee) and, admittedly, watching Rory’s hand move rapidly across the page of his notebook. At the end, they’re given a list of key points to take back to their groups and Jess, aware that he’s not going to remember a word of this if he doesn’t write it down and not wanting his Saturday morning to have been wasted in vain, elbows Rory and says, “Hey, man, can I borrow one of your pens?”

Rory hands him one of the pens. “I’ve seen how you treat writing utensils and if you even think about putting that in your mouth --”

“Relax,” Jess says, even as he fights the habitual urge to take the cap off with his teeth. “I’m not going to drool on it.” He copies what the leaders of the meeting have written on the board onto the back of his hand. “You’re here for that trans thing, yeah?”  


“Yeah,” he says. “Transgender Students for Equality. You’d be welcome anytime. Even if you show up late.”

Ignoring this last part, Jess says, “You guys seriously need a catchier name.” He tosses the pen back to Rory and collects his mugs. “See ya.”

It’s not until he steps outside and the cold November air hits him that he realizes he left his jacket in the meeting room, which is on the fifth floor of this elevator-less building. Mentally cursing the university for its lack of concern about accessibility, he climbs back up the five stories but he stops at the doorway because there, with his back to Jess, is Rory, still sitting in his seat, shoulders shaking slightly and making muffled sounds of sobbing. Jess considers just leaving the jacket, braving the walk across campus without it or just camping out in the hallway until Rory leaves. But Rory had lent him a pen, and for reasons Jess feels unable to articulate, this means he needs to go in and pull out the chair next to Rory’s and sit down with him. So that’s what he does.

As soon as Rory hears Jess come in, he turns away to wipe his eyes and plasters on a remarkably fake-looking smile.

“Hey,” he says, as Jess sits down.

“Hey,” Jess says. What do people say in this kind of situation? He’s never really been sure. So he sits and picks at the skin around his thumbnail and watches Rory.

“Sorry,” Rory says eventually. “I’m just sort of sleep deprived and being stupid and weird and --”

“Hey,” Jess says, interrupting. “You don’t need to apologize.”

“Right.” Rory wipes his nose with his sleeve. “I just got a text from my girlfriend. Paris.”

“Yeah,” Jess says. It’s a small college and all three of them are in the English department. “I know her. I think she almost chucked a copy of _Jane Eyre_ at me once.”

Rory gives a slightly wobbly laugh. “Yeah, that sounds like her.”

“Is she okay?” Jess asks.

“Yeah, she’s fine. The text wasn’t anything bad. It’s just been -- complicated between us. We started dating in high school, before I came out as trans. Before I even knew I was trans. And we came here together and then I started figuring out gender stuff and -- well, she’s never felt totally comfortable with a specific label. She likes the word sapphic.”

“Not surprising.”

“But I always felt like -- and I mean, I can’t decide her sexuality for her, she’s the only person who can say what she feels and who she is but -- I don’t know, just based on what I know of her, which I think is probably a lot because we’ve been together for four years -- I don’t know, like I said, I can’t speak for her --”

“Man, it’s okay,” Jess says. “You don’t have to do the whole disclaimer.”

Rory lets out his breath. “I’ve always thought she’s probably lesbian.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. And the thing is -- I’m out as a guy to most of the world but really my gender is sort of more complicated than that. I’m a guy but like, a kind of -- squishy guy.”

“Squishy?”

“Like you know those gushy toys that are like filled with water or some sort of gel stuff and they have glitter and you squeeze them? Squishy like that.”

“Okay,” Jess says. Strange to say, he thinks he knows what Rory means.

“Like, if really binary guys are like, a can of coke, I’m one of those toys.”

“We’re running dangerously close to some really weird phallic imagery.”

“You’re lucky I didn’t say cucumber.”

“Anyway.”

“Anyway. I think if I’d come out to her and said hey, Paris, I’m a man, she would have said okay, I love you but I don’t think I want to date a man and that would have been that. But instead what I said was hey, I’m not really a girl and I’m not quite a guy, I’m somewhere in the middle. I’m a genderqueer guy. And she’s been supportive and everything but...I feel like she heard the genderqueer part a lot more than she heard the guy part.”

“I get that,” Jess says. “I’ve dated nonbinary guys before and that’s been fine but it’s been important that they were guys. It might be the same for Paris, that she’d be fine dating a genderqueer girl or someone who’s just genderqueer and she’s tuning out the rest of it because -- I mean, she loves you.”

“Yeah,” Rory says. “And I love her. And it sucks. And it sucks because I usually talk to my mom about everything but I feel really weird talking to her about gender stuff. She’s been supportive too, but I can tell it’s sort of -- I mean, we were always the Gilmore girls, me and her. The two of us against the world. And she tries to put a good face on it but I can tell she misses us being girls together.”

Jess tries not to bristle at this. His own mother had treated his transition, like so much of the rest of his life, with little more than indifference, but he resents the idea that the mothers of trans guys are losing their daughters.

Rory goes on. “So we just don’t really talk about it. If my issues with Paris were about anything else I’d be calling my mom every night but -- I’ve barely mentioned it to her. And that feels shitty. And things with Paris feel shitty. And those are my two most important relationships and I hate this.”

Jess nods, thinking. “Do you want to come to my room and listen to music and drink beer and vent?” He’s not sure if it’s a normal or even an acceptable offer, but he’s not sure what else do, and that’s what he’d want if he were in Rory’s position.

“It’s nine in the morning,” Rory says.

“Yeah.”

“Isn’t that sort of early for beer?”

“Listen,” Jess says. “We just had an hour long meeting about God knows what at eight in the morning on a Saturday, and your life kind of sounds like it’s going to shit, so if there’s ever a time to day drink, I’d think it’d be now.”

So that’s what they do. After balking for a while at the messy state of Jess’ room, Rory grudgingly moves on to admiring his record player.

“You know,” he says, “if you were a straight guy I’d hate you. But I gotta say, this is pretty neat.”

“Then thank god I’m not straight. What do you want to listen to?”

“I dunno. What do you have?”

“Lots,” Jess says, pulling his boxes of records from his closet.

“Oh wow,” Rory says, coming to sit on the floor next to him. He reaches up to push his hair out of his face and Jess has to look away for a moment.

“What kinds of stuff do you like?”

“Lots,” Rory says. “I’m eclectic.”

“Like, do you mean actually eclectic or do you mean a wide variety of pop music?”

“Don’t be a dick.”

“Do you want sad music?”

Rory reflects a moment and then says, “Yeah, I think I do. I want to listen to sad music and lie on you horrifying messy floor and drink beer and maybe cry some. Is it weird to cry on the floor of a friend you’ve had for one day?”

“Nah, go ahead. How do you feel about Leonard Cohen.”

“I feel just dandy about Leonard Cohen.”

Jess carefully takes [_Various Positions_](https://open.spotify.com/album/6I58qJMqZHhb8jtNT3CuJB?si=q8EbMc5tQDWBUZHCuBn_lA) from its sleeve and sets it on the record player. “Has anyone ever told you you have a funny way of talking?”

“Yeah, most people do sooner or later. I blame my mother.”

Jess shoves books under his bed and clothes into his laundry hamper as “Dance Me to the End of Love” comes on. “There,” he says. ‘There’s some carpet for you to cry on.”

“How sweet,” Rory says, lying down with his arms under his head as Jess opens his battered mini-fridge with his foot and pulls out a beer for each of them. For a while they drink in silence, listening to Leonard Cohen. Then Rory says, “I don’t think I knew how few friends I had until things started getting weird with Paris.”

Jess makes a vague sound of interest.

“I mean, I have friends. But like, casual friends. Friends I’ve had a few classes with, who I can sit down with in the cafeteria or study with. Not like, friends I can call at three in the morning when I need to spill my guts. And I think that’s because I’ve always had my mom and Paris so I didn’t really need anyone. But I need someone now and I guess it’s sort of sad that I’m halfway through my second year of college and I haven’t gotten close to anyone. My best friends are my best friend and my mom. Oh my god.”

Jess, sensing the approach of more sobbing, leans over to the fridge to grab Rory a second beer. “Hey, that’s not so bad,” he says, popping the cap off and handing the bottle over. “Making friends in college is always hard, it doesn’t actually say anything about you as a person.”

“You have friends.”

Jess shrugs. “I got lucky.”

“You’re not even nice to people and you have friends.” Rory stops, looks at Jess, looks into his beer bottle. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. You’re being really nice to me. I just mean you go around looking like you’ll pull out the teeth of anyone who tries to talk to you.”

Jess shrugs again. “I don’t like it here. I can be nice when I feel happy and safe.”

“You don’t feel happy and safe on campus?”

“Nope.”

“Huh.” Rory takes another sip from his beer.

Jess waits for Rory to ask _Why not?_ , waits for the moment when he’ll have to try to put into words the sense of total alienation he has every time he leaves the suite he shares with two of his friends. But Rory lets it go.

“I just feel like a loser. A lonely, about to get dumped loser.”

“You’re not a loser. You’ve got -- man, you’ve got all those fucking pens.”

“Thanks.”

“Hey, I don’t know you that well,” Jess says. “If I knew you, I’m sure I’d know lots of reasons that you aren’t a loser.”

“You want to know me?”

“Yeah,” Jess says. “I mean, I never have a pen when I need one.”

Rory gives a short laugh.

“And you seem smart,” Jess goes on, understanding that Rory needs whatever actual validation he can get right now. “I see you around reading good books. You’re cute. I could use more trans guy friends. Or trans guy-ish friends. You like Leonard Cohen. All good signs in my book.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You really think I’m cute?”

“Yeah.”

Rory makes a face. “I always worry that I look like a five year old.”

“Nah,” Jess says. “You’ve got a baby face, but you dress like a forty year old British man. It balances out.”

“I do not dress like a forty year old British man!”

“Okay, I know for a fact that you own three separate tweed jackets.”

Rory crosses his arms. “Five, actually.”

“You see my point?”

“Well, you own multiple leather jackets.”

“Yeah, and in what universe does that make me a nerd?”

“Okay, fine.”

“You’re a cute nerd. This started as a compliment.”

Rory rolls his eyes, but he smiles, too.

An hour later they really are lying on the carpet, which so far has absorbed no tears, listening to [ Mitski ](https://open.spotify.com/album/16i5KnBjWgUtwOO7sVMnJB?si=hUOwe5ghQiuS6j_2FpwYoA) and talking about their favorite gay poets -- Rory’s is Richard Siken’s and Jess’ is Frank O’Hara.

“Do you know ‘Having a Coke with You?’” Jess asks.

“Of course,” Rory says.

“Too bad.”

“What do you mean?”

Jess grins. “Because I like it when I get to read it to someone for the first time.”

“That’s sweet,” Rory says. “You’re such a sap under all the --” He gestures at Jess.

Jess shrugs. He could say _I’m not a sap, I’m just serious about love._ He could say, _punks like good poetry._ He could say _I’m just trying to feel safe._ He doesn’t say anything.

“And then there’s Emily Dickinson,” Rory says. “I bet you hate her, though.”

Jess snorts. “She was a reclusive lesbian who obsessively wrote incredibly hard to understand poems. I love her.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

Rory smiles at him, a little tipsily. “There’s more to you than meets the eye, Mr. Mariano.”

“Alright.”

“Jess,” he says, his tone changing.

“Yeah?”

They look at each other across the foot of brown carpet between them.

Rory blinks slowly. “I’m scared.”

“What are you scared of?”

“I’m scared that I’m going to break up with Paris and then I’ll have to figure out how to have an actual life and not just a relationship.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.”

“We’re roommates.”

“Oh man,” Jess says, rolling away from Rory. “Rookie mistake.”

Rory sits up. “I mean, we’ve been together for years. We picked out our college together.”

“No.”

“Yes!”

“Man, no wonder you’re freaking out,” Jess says, sitting up and leaning against the frame of his bed.

“This is what I’ve been trying to say! This is like, my whole life. We were supposed to be together forever.”

“You’re high school sweethearts.”

Rory sighs and looks at his lap. “Yeah, but we’re a lot more than that. We were supposed to be the ones who made it. Who got married and had kids together. We were gonna show them pictures of us at prom together and they were going to be totally grossed out by how sappy their moms are except they’re definitely not going to have moms and probably none of it is going to happen at all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Have you ever had your heart broken? Like stomped on the sidewalk, kicked down the gutter broken?”

Jess shakes his head. He’s never really loved someone enough to be really wrecked by a breakup.

“I feel like that’s what’s coming for me,” Rory says. “I feel like I’m watching a car coming toward me at 80 miles an hour and I can’t get out of its way. All I can do is wait for it to hit me.”

“Maybe the car will swerve.”

Rory shrugs, chews on his lip. “I don’t think so.”

He really is going to cry now, and Jess doesn’t know what to do. His mother was never big on affection, and he’s always thought the absence of touch in his childhood is what makes him so awkward with it now. All the same, he scoots himself over to where Rory is sitting with his back to the wall and tentatively, almost afraid, puts his arm around Rory’s shoulder. He knows right away that it was the right thing to do because this kid who he’s never even had a proper conversation with until today leans his whole wait against Jess and, with his head pressed to Jess’ shoulder, begins to cry. They sit like that for a long while and Jess does his best to ignore the growing pain in his back. He thinks of saying something like _Rory, you’ll still have a life without Paris._ Or _you are your own person._ Or _life goes on._ Everything he can think of sounds like something you’d find on a Dove chocolate wrapper. He thinks about how weird it is that Dove makes soap and chocolate. Is that the same company?  [ Mitski sings](https://open.spotify.com/track/7rWGO6nfsDwHTqYrHP9eSh?si=bIQaWuaTTTmAOzVGmbOYqA), _What do you do with a loving feeling if the loving feeling makes you all alone? What do you do with a loving feeling if they only love you when you’re all alone?_ He squeezes Rory’s shoulder. The crying has subsided by now, but still Rory lays with his head on Jess’ chest, his breathing a little steadying out little by little.

He sits up. “Shit,” he says, wiping urgently at his eyes as if he’s only now realizing what he’s been doing. “Sorry, that was so so weird, I promise I’m not normally like this.”

“I know,” Jess says. “We all have bad days.”

“Thanks for this. For the music and for letting me cry on your shoulder and just. Being there. Here. With me.”

“No problem.”

“I should go. Paris and I usually eat lunch together.”

“Okay.”

“Can I um, can I get your number?”

“Oh,” Jess says. “Sure.”

They trade numbers and Jess takes Rory to the door of the suite. In the hallway, Rory turns back to wave and Jess waves back and the moment hurts for a reason he doesn’t quite understand and won’t think about.

As he heads back to his room, his roommate Peter emerges into the common room in boxers and a tank top, attempting to push his mop of hair from his eyes. “You had someone over?”

“Yeah,” Jess says. “Sort of a weird story, actually.”

“Who was it.”

“Rory Gilmore?”

“That kid who wears bow ties to class?”

“Only sometimes. It’s sort of cute.”

“Uh-huh.” Peter starts fiddling with the coffee machine. “What were you and sort of cute Rory Gilmore doing?”

“Crying, actually. I mean he was. I wasn’t.”

“Shit, Jess, you made him cry?”

“No! He was crying when I found him. And then I brought him over here for. For beer and sad music and then he cried some more.”

“Were you like, trying to get with him?”

“He has a girlfriend and he was crying.”

“So that’s a no?”

“Yeah, that’s a no.”

Having finally succeeded in loading and starting the coffee maker, Peter shuffles off toward the bathroom, saying as he goes, “You’re into him though, aren’t you?”

“Man, he was crying!”

“That wasn’t a no,” Peter calls back as disappears behind the bathroom door.

Jess heads back to his room. The Mitski record has played to its end and he puts it back in the sleeve. Peter is entirely shameless about both his attractions and his relationships, which tend to be more like flings than fully fledged partnerships. Jess generally likes this quality in him -- Peter is as unprudish as they come -- but it also means that it can sometimes be difficult for Jess to communicate his own experience of attraction. Jess loves rarely but ferociously, consumingly. In truth, he’s never actually had a relationship with someone he was really in love with. Things have never lined up right. He’s been happy enough with the boyfriends he’s had, but there’s been nothing that serious. All the same, he knows what it feels like to fall for someone, and he’s not falling for Rory Gilmore.

He pulls his phone out of his pocket and sees a notification from a new number with the text _This is Rory!!_ followed by two smiley face emojis. Without unlocking his phone to open the text and save the contact, he pushes back the covers on his bed and climbs in. He’s going back to sleep.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re telling me you’re going to Yale to make your uncle happy so you can run a small town bookstore?” Rory looks more than incredulous. He almost looks like he’s going to start crying again.
> 
> “Yeah,” Jess says. “I got a full ride.” 
> 
> “You’re kidding.”
> 
> “Nope. I wrote them a nice essay about how I was flunking all my classes until I got moved out of my shitty mom’s shitty apartment, got therapy and meds for my ADHD, and was able to come out as trans and start T. They liked it. Plus they liked that I started getting A’s after all that because, you know, I could actually function.”

The next day, Jess wakes up from his nap on one of the armchairs on the silent floor of the library to find Rory looking down at him, insistently tapping his leg with a book. He tugs the earbuds from his ears.

“You didn’t text me back,” Rory says. 

Jess sits up, rubbing a hand across his face. “It’s the quiet floor.”

Rory narrows his eyes. “Like you respect the quiet floor rules.”

“We can talk in the stairwell.”

When the door has swung shut behind them, Jess says, “I actually do respect the quiet floor rules because I respect the other people trying to nap there.”

“Do you ever study?”

Jess crosses his arms. “Why are you so pissed?”

“I’m not pissed.”

“Whatever.”   


“I already said. You didn’t text me back.”

“I didn’t have anything I needed to say to you.”

“I thought we were going to be friends.”   


“Maybe not, if you come hunt me down in the library after I go, what, 26 hours without replying to a ‘this is my contact info’ text.”

They stand for a moment like that, facing each other and not speaking, before Rory turns to go back into the reading room.

“Rory, wait.”

He stands, his back to Jess, his hand on the door. 

Jess takes a breath. “I’m sorry I didn’t reply. But I really was going to talk to you. I didn’t realize I was hurting you. But seriously, you didn’t need to come find me.”

Rory turns back to him. “Okay. I’m sorry I wigged. I don’t think Paris and I are very good for one another’s social skills.”

“I don’t think spending all your time with one person is good for anyone’s social skills.”

“Yeah,” Rory says. He goes to sit down on the first step, and Jess sits down next to him. “Plus we both have anxiety. Which is nice in a lot of ways, because we don’t have to explain stuff to each other, but it also sort of means that we reinforce some of our pre-existing issues.”

“Yeah, I get that. I’ve had those people in my life.” 

“We’re good?”

“We’re good.”

Rory lets out his breath. “Sorry I woke you up.”

“That’s okay. 

“So do you ever study in the library?”

“Nah, I just like it cause it’s quiet.”

“Do you ever study at all?”   


Jess shrugs. “Not really.”

“So why are you going to college? And how are you passing your classes? I feel like I’m barely keeping my head above water and I basically never stop working.”

“I’m here because I made a deal with my uncle. I lived with him when I was in high school, in the apartment above his diner. He bought the store next to his diner basically just to keep this complete whackjob who lives in our town from buying it and turning it into, I kid you not, a collectable plate store. So anyway one night we’re doing the usual twelve rounds of ‘Jess, you gotta get your life together, you gotta figure out what you’re doing after you graduate’ and I said I’d rent the place next door from him and turn it into a bookstore. He said okay, he’d give me a great deal on the rent since right now it’s just standing empty, but he’d only do it if I went to college. So here I am.”

“You’re telling me you’re going to Yale to make your uncle happy so you can run a small town bookstore?” Rory looks more than incredulous. He almost looks like he’s going to start crying again.

“Yeah,” Jess says. “I got a full ride.” 

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. I wrote them a nice essay about how I was flunking all my classes until I got moved out of my shitty mom’s shitty apartment, got therapy and meds for my ADHD, and was able to come out as trans and start T. They liked it. Plus they liked that I started getting A’s after all that because, you know, I could actually function.”

“Wow,” Rory says. “You’re like a mental health poster boy.”

“I prefer to think of it as living proof that neat things happen when you don’t treat kids like shit.”

“That works too. And you really don’t want anything more than the bookstore next door to your uncle?”   


“Nope.”

“Sorry,” Rory says, pressing his hands between his knees. “That was kind of rude, wasn’t it?”

“A bit."

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. So, what are you doing here?”

“What?”

“At Yale. You asked me, I’m asking you.”

“Oh,” Rory says. “I’ve wanted to go to an Ivy league school since I knew what college was. I want to do overseas journalism.”

“Ambitious.”

Rory snorts. “Not compared to Paris. I am small-time compared to Paris.”

“What does Paris want to do?”

“Be the first female President of the United States.”

“Very ambitious.”

“She says she won’t be bitter if another woman gets there first and that she’ll celebrate it as a feminist victory but I know her, she’ll be furious if she doesn’t get to have that claim to eternal fame.”

“Paris sounds terrifying.”

“You’re not wrong.”

“How did you guys end up together in the first place?”

A smile spreads across Rory’s face. It’s the most genuinely happy Jess has ever seen him when talking about Paris, maye the most genuinely happy he’s seen him at all. “Okay so in high school we hated each other. I mean like, Katy Perry versus Taylor Swift hated each other. Except we were both big gay nerds instead of extremely heterosexual pop stars. Anyway, we had a group project for our Shakespeare class and through a pretty weird series of events I ended up playing Juliet and she ended up playing Romeo -- this was before I came out, believe me, we made a lot of jokes about it afterward -- and so we had to kiss onstage and so we kissed and it was. Well, you know how it is.”

“Do I?”

“When you kiss someone and it’s just so immediately electric and amazing and you sort of go crazy for a while because you can’t think about anything other than kissing them?”

Jess doesn’t know how that is, but he nods anyway.

Rory pushes his hair back. “So for a while we were just making out in the girls’ bathroom between classes all the time and vehemently denying that we had any actual feelings for each other, which was really weird for both of us, and then slowly, bit by bit, we realized that we had never really hated each other, we were just rivals because we were both near the top of the class. Well, at the top of the class. And also we had a lot of very real feelings for each other and the longer we pretended that it wasn’t anything real the more miserable we were making ourselves. So we got together.”

“Congratulations, that’s a much weirder story than I was expecting.”

“People think we’re an odd couple but we’re actually pretty similar.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. People think I’m like chill and nice and she’s a nightmare. But the truth is, I mostly seem nice because I’m a compulsive people-pleaser and she only seems like a nightmare because she’s never been able to please people no matter how hard she tries so she just gave up and she just says what she’s thinking no matter what. So really we’re just two sides of the same coin.”

Jess grins. “Are you saying you aren’t really nice?”

Rory doesn’t smile back. “The thing is, I don’t really know. I used to think I was but recently I’ve been wondering how much of it is just self-preservation. Trying to get people to like me, because in the end people not liking me is what I’m most scared of. Paris isn’t scared of that at all. I really do admire that about her.”

“I think I’d like Paris if I got to know her.”

Now Rory does smile. “I think you would, too. It always makes me happy when people like Paris. She deserves it. People are hard way too hard on her.”

“I can sympathize with that.”

“Do you maybe wanna hang out sometime? The three of us?”

Jess wants to ask if that’ll be strange, Rory and his girlfriend who he might be breaking up with and his brand new friend. Rory the ever-pleasant and the two porcupines he’s inexplicably drawn to. But instead, he just says, “Yeah, sure, that’d be fun.”

“Cool,” Rory says, smiling, and stands up. “I’ll text you. And text me back this time, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay, I’d better get back to studying. And you get back to -- whatever stuff you do instead of studying. Seriously, what is your secret?”

Jess stands up and stuffs his hands in his pockets. “I read fast, I write fast, and I could bullshit my way out of locked safe, blindfolded.”

“Maybe my problem is that I care too much.”

“It might be.”

Rory sighs, turn on his heel, and re-enters the reading room. 

**

Besides his roommates and the other members of the gay socialists club, Jess’ best friend at Yale is Lane Kim. Lane, who had applied to every Ivy League school in the hopes of being accepted somewhere so prestigious that her tyrant of a mother would allow her to attend a non-Christian school, is also the first friend Jess made at college. He’d been reading in his room on his first evening after moving in when he heard, from some distant corner of his dorm, the unmistakable sound of The Clash singing “Train in Vain” and had followed the sound to its source and knocked on the door of the room it was coming from. The song stopped immediately and Lane stuck her head out of the door, looking flustered and apologetic. 

“Sorry,” she said. “Too loud?”

“No, I just wanted to say nice music.”

“Oh,” Lane said, with the smallest hint of smile. Then she laughed. “Sorry if I seemed sort of freaked out. Someone knocking on my door usually isn’t good news for me.”

Jess raised an eyebrow. “Mom or dad?”

“Mom,” she said, hesitating, apparently unnerved by Jess’ understanding of what she’d meant.

“Hey, me too.” 

“Anyway, I’m not used to being able to play my music on anything other than -- I kid you not -- a walkman that I used to keep under my mattress, so I was taking advantage of the first ability to just blast it. So....you like The Clash?”

“Love them.”

“Wanna come in and listen with me?”

And so they had become friends, spending many happy evenings silently listening to music or, if they were driving together, which they did fairly regularly to visit Luke on weekends, screaming along. Luke, instinctively protective of kids whose parents were parents only in name, had immediately taken a liking to Lane, and she had a standing invitation to come stay in the apartment above the diner, eat outrageous portions of fries, and sit with Jess on the roof to people-watch. Lane had gotten Jess, who she’d accused of being stuck in the 60’s, into newer music: Mitski and St. Vincent, Bleachers and Mother Mother. In return, Jess gave Lane free access to his boxes of records, mostly older punk bands. It was a mutual education, and they both enjoyed it. They tolerated each other’s vices -- Jess’ was cigarettes, Lane’s was weed -- and got along as well as Jess had ever gotten along with anyone in his life.

Now the two of them lie as usual on the ratty couch that takes up a third of Lane’s bedroom, Jess with his feet propped up on the armrest by Lane’s head, listening to  [ Patti Smith ](https://open.spotify.com/album/7xg7u99lilTCPbaRfnYuy6?si=KCH9SOkdRmCXsGu7pwQ2rA) and talking. 

“So you’re friends with this kid because you walked in on him crying about his girlfriend and now you’re gonna hang out with him,  _ with  _ the girlfriend?”

“Yep.”

“And that’s not gonna be weird?”

“Oh, it’s going to be super weird.”

“Does the girlfriend know you?”

“Well, she knows I don’t like Emily Bronte.”

“And that’s bad news for you?”   


“Very.”

“Well, I hope you survive.”

Jess is supposed to meet up with them in an hour and he’s feeling nervous. He can’t remember the last time he was nervous to hang out with people. He essentially has two modes when dealing with others: friendly or hostile. Anxiety has never been part of the equation. But then, he suspects Paris Gellar can make just about anyone nervous. 

“Hey,” Lane says, poking Jess’ temple with her toe.

Jess glares at her without any real menace. “What?”

“I have news. Boy news.”

Jess sits up a little. Thanks to her mother, Lane had a barely existent dating history before college, and since then has only managed a few painfully awkward tinder dates. The whole adventure was momentarily paused when she realized she was bisexual, decided she just wanted to date girls for a while, and then realized she was overwhelmed by terror at the thought of dating a girl. She’s beginning to get past that, but a childhood in a conservative ultra-Christian household has done more damage in this particular area than Jess’ childhood of consistent neglect from his mother and periodic abuse from her boyfriends. For now, she’s not worrying about rushing to date girls and just taking time to get more comfortable with herself. 

“Who’s the boy?”

“You know the band I’ve been practicing with?”

“Yeah.”

“The lead vocalist and guitarist asked me out on a date.”

“And do you like him?”

“I do. I’m also constantly reminded of how much my mother would hate him.”

“Ah.”

“I’ve been trying to decide if she would hate him most because he’s not Korean, because he’s Jewish, or because he plays rock music. I think it might be a three-way tie. But my mom is far, far away and he’s cute and he’s funny and he likes me.”

“Which is basically the best quality a guy can have.”

“Exactly.”

“So what are you guys doing?”

“Dinner and a movie.”

“How very 1950s. Will there be a stop at the soda fountain?”

“No, and the movie will be R rated.”

“Well, then, your street cred can remain intact.”

Lane sighs and smiles her big, uncontainable smile of real happiness. Jess feels a tightness in his heart when he thinks how much more frequent that smile has become as Lane has had more and more time away from her mother. She spends her vacations at home and is noticeably quieter and slower to smile when she comes back, constantly making herself small in whatever space she occupies, shrinking her presence in a room. It makes Jess sad, but also grateful that he doesn’t have to visit his own mother. 

He’d arrived at Luke’s doorstep years before, angry and resentful and ready to lash out at anyone who tried to connect to him. Things had gotten better slowly, in large part thanks to Luke. Luke had housed him, fed him, helped him with his transition, strong-armed him into starting therapy, and loved him. It was Luke, not Jess’ therapist, who had broken through the initial fog of destructive fury that had prevented him from even attempting to bond with anyone in his new town. Jess had been suspended for fighting and Luke left the diner to meet with the principal and bring Jess home. He’d been furious when he’d first arrived at the school, but by the time they were riding back toward home in silence, his anger seemed to have cooled. He knew, of course, that Jess’ anger was particularly vivid -- he had never imagined it as red but as bright acid green -- just now because the school holidays were coming up and his mother had not so much as called about the possibility of Jess going home to visit. It was strange, he thought, how that could sting even if he didn’t want to go. Without turning to look at Jess, Luke said, “You know, you don’t have to love her.”

How that hit him, harder than any punch ever had. How that released him. He’d actually started crying -- something he rarely did, something he’d never done in front of Luke. It was an uncontrollable, violent, embarrassing kind of crying. Wailing sobs shook his body, left him gasping for air. Luke, taken entirely by surprise by this reaction, pulled the car over to the side of the road and awkwardly, across the gearshift, pulled Jess toward him into a hug that Jess did not resist. He’d badly needed someone to cry on just then. 

That day had changed his relationship with Luke, and, a little more slowly, with the entire world around him. It still hurt, would always hurt, that his mother didn’t care about him, but Luke had unquestionably changed Jess’ life by telling him out loud that he was free of obligation to her. Lane, he knew, was still painfully working through her own sense of obligation not only to love her mother but to follow the rules that had constrained her through her whole life until she left for college. He returns her smile across the length of the couch. 

He says, “Have fun, okay?”

“I will.”

“If you start freaking out because you think about what Mrs. Kim would think, you can always call me.” Their first promise to one another, made on a day when they’d both been feeling miserable, was that they could call at any time of the day or night they needed to talk about anything related to their mothers. 

“I think that might go down a little weird. Like, ‘Hey Dave, I’m calling another guy but don’t worry it’s just to talk about my deep-seated anxiety about my mother’s approval.’”

“Well, you can just tell him I’m gay.” 

Lane gives him a look.

“Seriously,” he goes on. “This is what bathrooms are for. Plus you can text me.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not what bathrooms are actually for.”

“When our bladders get digitized and toilets become obsolete, we’ll still need bathrooms to make phone calls that we can’t make in front of our dates.”

“But what will the excuse be? No more claiming the need to pee.”

Jess shrugs. “Sorry, gotta go switch out my USB bladder.”

“You have a very loose grip on how technology functions.”

“Whatever.”

They lapse into silence for a while, listening to the music.

“This Rory,” Lane says. “He doesn’t seem like your usual type.”

“What do you mean, my type?”

“Like the type of person you’re usually friends with. He seems pretty preppy.”

“Yeah,” Jess says. “I guess. He’s super organized and wears tweed and goes to class. So I guess not really my type. But he’s also -- I don’t know. I like the way he talks. I see him reading a lot and he reads all kinds of books. Like, really all over the map. I want to know why. He likes good music. He likes Mitski.”

“Okay, that’s a point in his favor.”

It’s more than that and Jess knows it, but he’s having trouble putting into words what it is that draws him to Rory. He thinks of how Rory admitted to not being sure that he was a good person, his eagerness for others to love Paris as he does, the way he had curled into Jess the other day as he cried.

Something of his thoughts must show on his face because Lane says, “What?”

Jess shakes his head. “You’ll laugh at me.”

“Come on.”

“I mean it.”

“When have I ever laughed at you?”

Jess sighs. “He’s tender-hearted. That’s what I like about him.”

Lane doesn’t laugh, but she does let out a syrupy, “Awwww,” that makes Jess wince and roll his eyes. 

“That’s why I didn’t wanna say it out loud.”

“That’s sweet.”

“I just couldn’t think of any other way to say it.”

Now Lane rolls her eyes. “You don’t have to make excuses for saying something sweet.”

“Hey, I’ve got street cred to worry about too.”

“I wouldn’t tell a soul how sweet you actually are.”

“You’d better not.”

Jess’ phone buzzes and he checks it. There’s a text from Rory that reads  _ Meeting up in half an hour? _

“Ooh who is that?” Lane asks. “You should see your face.”

“What about my face?” Jess says, looking up from his phone.

“You just had that look.”

“What look?”

Lane gives him a look as though she thinks he’s being purposely dense. “The look you get when you get a text from someone you like.”

“Oh,” Jess says. “It’s just Rory. Half hour check-in. Like those texts you get from airlines before your flight if you don’t tell them to fuck off and never text you.”

“Ah,” Lane says. She has a knowing look but Jess, already suspecting that she’ll get on the “you have a crush on Rory” train if given half a chance, doesn’t say anything about it.

“Paris seems. Well. Terrifying, so I’d better get there on time.”

“Can you stay to the end of the album?” 

Neither of them likes to stop an album before it’s finished. They’re two tracks from the end of this one -- long tracks, admittedly, but he only has to walk a few minutes to get to Rory’s dorm so he nods. “Yeah.” Unlocking his phone again, he texts Rory  _ See you soon.  _


	3. Chapter 3

Jess goes to Rory’s dorm to meet him and Paris and finds the two of them sitting together on a sofa in the ground floor common room, arguing goodnaturedly about the episode of  _ Crazy Ex-Girlfriend  _ playing on the TV. Rory has an arm around Paris’ shoulder and Paris is resting her head on Rory’s chest and the first thing that Jess thinks is that they look remarkably comfortable together. It doesn’t really make any sense for him to be jealous; after all, college is the place where he’s most surrounded by people who are comfortable with him and with whom he is comfortable. The past few years, coming as they have in the wake of his transition, his coming to terms with his sexuality, his slow and stumbling recovery from his miserable and touch-starved childhood, have been a revelation in terms of what physical comfort with others can mean. His roommates are almost outrageously affectionate, cuddling up on their futon to watch movies together and lovingly tackling each other on the slightest provocation. It’s taken Jess a while to get used to, but in truth he loves it. He loves too the cautious affection that exists between himself and Lane who, like him, grew up virtually untouched and is now simultaneously desperate for and slightly frightened by any contact. So he shouldn’t be jealous of Rory and Paris settled into one another as they are, but, undeniably, he is. He’s a little surprised, too, given what he knows about the current state of their relationship. But then people who are used to one another don’t stop being used to one another when things get complicated. 

“He’s too gross to be fun,” Paris says.

“I’m not saying he’s not gross,” Rory replies. “I’m just saying gross and fun can overlap. You gotta admit, the zoo song was funny.”

Paris smiles. “Yes, the zoo song was funny.”

“Hey,” Jess says from the doorway and the two of them look up, comically in sync like two puppets on the same glove. 

“Oh, hey,” Rory says. “I didn’t take you for the early type.”

Jess shrugs. “I’m not, I was just nearby.”

“Wanna watch the rest of the episode with us? It’s just a few minutes.”

“Sure.” 

Jess sits down on the couch, leaving a wide space between himself and the collective body that is Rory-and-Paris. 

“Do you know the show?” Rory asks.

Jess nods. Musicals aren’t really his thing but the plotline itself is interesting.

“Paris and I usually watch it together and we’re binging now because we got way behind during midterm season.”

It’s almost Thanksgiving break now, and there’s been a slight decrease in school work, though Jess doesn’t do enough of it for it to make much of a difference to him.

“Paris,” Rory says, “this is Jess.”

“Yeah, I know, I’ll say hi when it’s over,” Paris says, still watching the screen. Jess grins in spite of himself. He has to admire that kind of dedication to media. 

They finish the episode in silence and Paris hits the power button on the remote and turns to Jess.

“You were that dick in my 19th century English lit class.”

“Nice to meet you, too.”

“Paris, this is my  _ friend,  _ Jess, who has been very nice to me this past week.”

Paris looks at Rory and then back at Jess. She says, “He doesn’t like any of the Bronte sisters.”

“Nope.”

“Misogynist.” 

“I also hate Conrad and love Austen, it’s not about gender.”

“Only Austen?”

“And George Eliot and Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Happy?”   


Paris narrows her eyes at him, but then nods. “If Rory likes you.”

“Alright, why don’t we go out for drinks?” Rory says, standing up from her position between the two of them on the couch. He has the flustered air of someone trying to keep apart two fighting toddlers. Jess has to fight the urge to say  _ she started it,  _ which would have been perfectly true and entirely irrelevant. 

They go to a little hole-in-the-wall place across the street from Rory’s dorm. It’s one of Jess’ favorite local bars and he’s irrationally delighted when Rory suggests it. The three of them squeeze into the corner table into the back and place their orders. The bar can comfortably fit about fifteen people which means that on most weekends there are around twenty, but it’s the weekend before Thanksgiving and a lot of people have already headed home for the holidays, so there’s actually enough air to breathe and they don’t have to raise their voices to hear one another.

Rory doesn’t get a chance to make any of the pleasant small talk that Jess suspects he had lined up for this evening because Paris dives right in. “So, Jess,” she says. “Rory tells me you didn’t actually want to go to college.”

“Nope.”

“Why?”   


“I hate school,” Jess says evenly.

“I’ve been in class with you, you’re smart even if you have some bad opinions on England’s best female novelists --”

“Oh, come on --”

“So you obviously don’t hate learning.”

“First of all,” Jess says, leaning across the table toward Paris, “there’s no  _ way  _ you can rank any of the Bronte’s who, by the way, even if you like them, really only had one great novel a piece, above Austen.”

“I’d take  _ Jane Eyre  _ over  _ Pride and Prejudice  _ any day.”

“Yeah, but over  _ Emma _ ?”

“So you’re not just a greatest hits guy.”

“Nope.”

“Back to my other question.”

“About learning?”

“Yeah.”

A waiter sets down their drinks and Jess notices Rory immediate starting to drink his vaguely pink cocktail through a straw.

“I don’t hate leaning, but college isn’t about learning, it’s about class gatekeeping.”

“That’s ludicrous.”

“Is it? So why is it so goddamn expensive, if it’s not about denying poor people access to education and higher-paying jobs?”

“Because it’s expensive to run a university.”

“Come on, Paris.You and me and board of trustees all know that public higher education is completely viable. It’s about prestige, which means it’s about class.”

“So why even have financial aid? Why let people like you in? Ow!” Paris turns to Rory with a look of irritation and Jess realizes that Rory must have stepped on her foot.

“I don’t mind you saying that,” Jess says, more to Rory than Paris. “My world is very different from your world. And yes, I’m fine with that. But financial aid is all about the charade of American universities pretending to uplift the marginalized. Get a couple poster children, but not enough to actually change anything. Make sure they’re so grateful for the help you gave them that they’ll ditch any loyalty to the people they came from. It’s a scam.”

“It’s a tradition, thousands of years old.”

“Yeah,” Jess says, taking a sip his whiskey -- the same kind as Paris has, sitting still untouched in front of her. “Just like the tradition of keeping poor people poor to the benefit of the rich.”

“I should have known this would happen,” Rory says, resting his chin on his hand. “Two people who love to argue, put them in a room together and they argue. Big surprise.” Then he squints at Jess. “You don’t like to argue though, you like to fight.”

Jess isn’t entirely sure how Rory has come to this conclusion but he can’t deny it so he just shrugs. 

“Well, we can agree on some things,” Paris says. “Like how terrible Joseph Conrad is.”

And so the three of them begin happily insulting Conrad and a host of other authors whose writings they’ve had to endure through various English department courses.

Jess has never been a heavy drinker, knowing as he does that between genetic factors and his ADHD, he’s ludicrously prone to addiction. His cigarettes are bad enough; he doesn’t need to get hooked on anything else. He’d been given Vicodin once by a friend and realized the next day that he could never take it again, ever, not even under a doctor’s orders. All the same, he finds staying away from alcohol entirely both socially difficult and ineffective because if he avoids drinking generally then he only drinks when he’s miserable, and that’s no good. Instead, he’s imposed an iron limit of three drinks in a day, and he sticks to it. Now, on his second drink, he’s already mentally preparing any attempt of Rory’s, who is treating the three of them, to buy him more than a third. Incredible, he thinks, how pushy people get about spending their own money so you can have a drink you don’t even want. But he hopes Rory won’t be like that -- though he notices with some anxiety that Rory is drinking more than either him or Paris. Maybe, he thinks, it’s because it’s all in the form of sweet and fruity cocktails, which can easily get you drunker than you meant to get because they essentially taste like juice. But still he worries because Rory is looser, happier, lighter than Jess has seen him before and he knows how hard it is to give up something that eases the internal pressure of -- of what? Of being a person, of being trans, of being at college. And then there’s Paris and Rory’s mom and probably a dozen other things that Jess doesn’t even know about. He resists the urge to pull Rory’s drink away from him. He’ll say something if Rory gets another. 

At some point Paris goes to the bathroom and it’s just Rory and Jess, which somehow feels entirely different from the three of them together, and much different from the two of them on the other occasions they’ve hung out. Rory is looking at him, his eyes a little spacy, his smile easy. Jess wants to reach out and touch the corner of Rory’s mouth. Instead, he asks the first question he can think of. 

“Why do you wear bowties?”

Rory’s smile widens. “What, don’t you like them?”

“I’d probably kill if I had to wear one myself but they’re cute on you, I’m just asking because it’s sort of unusual.”

Rory takes another sip of his drink. “Last year my great-grandmother died -- sort of incredible, to have a great-grandmother still alive when you’re in college but my mom had me when she was really young but hey, that’s an entirely separate story -- what was I talking about? The bowties! So yeah my great-grandmother died and I looked up how to tie a bowtie so I could tie my grandfather’s, and I tried it on myself and I liked it.”

“It works for you. You’ve got the whole Teddy boy look going.”

“Teddy boy?”

“Think a cross between the 1900 and 1960.”

“Sounds weird.”

“It is, a bit. But like I said, it works for you.”

Rory grins at him and slaps his arm. “Thanks, man. I like it. It’s a nice boy thing, you know? Like that was around the time I was really trying to figure out how to change my wardrobe to make me less dysphoric and eventually I figured out it was the little things. Bowties and shoes and jackets that fit right without emphasizing my waist-to-hip ratio, you know?”

Jess nods. They have absolutely different senses of fashion but Jess loves his leather jackets and his sneakers that look like a 15 year old boy would think they were incredibly cool. There are different ways to do masculinity, Jess thinks. Not that Rory is exactly masculine, drinking his pink cocktail through a straw and twirling his hair between his fingers, but he is  _ boyish  _ in that hard-to-define way that makes Jess feel so absolutely gay. Jess thinks this, and then he looks at that thought, and then he thinks,  _ oh shit _ . 

Paris comes back and sits back down across from Jess and says, “People who carve graffiti into bathroom stalls have absolutely no originality. It’s all just the names of couples and ‘fuck New Haven’ and never anything with any flair.”

“So if it had flair you’d be fine with the graffiti?” Jess asks. 

Paris pauses for a split second and then says, “No, but if you’re going to do it, at least be interesting.”

Jess tries to focus all his attention on Paris as she dives back into her criticism of the freshman seminars on literature, tries not to look at Rory, tries to cut off at its root the thing he had felt just before Paris had returned. Because he can’t feel that for Rory, certainly not now when he’s tangled up in a complicated relationship that’s lasted three years and seen Rory through the messiest period of his life. But Jess can’t help it. He don’t know how much of it he can blame the whiskey or how much of it he can blame on Rory’s knee pressed to his under the tiny table but what he feels is a blossoming in the pit of his stomach, something lush and green pressing up through his ribcage and his throat, tangling around his heart. He has to look away. He can’t have a crush on Rory Gilmore but here he is, counting Rory’s drinks and wanting to touch the corner of his mouth and admiring his boyishness. He drags his attention back to Paris who is, impressively, still monologuing about reading lists. Jess glances at Rory and Rory looks back, smiling the affectionate smile of someone who has heard this rant a hundred times and is somehow still unalterably fond of the one giving it. Jess knocks back the end of his whiskey.

By the time they leave, Rory is drunk enough to throw an arm around him and Paris. He wants badly to reciprocate, but he can feel Paris’ hand pressed between himself and Rory so he keeps his arms folded in front of his chest as they return to Rory’s dorm. 

“This was nice,” Rory says, looking from one to the other. “I think you two will be best friends forever if you only ever talk about things you both hate.” He giggles a little at this and then stops abruptly and then says, more seriously, “I really hope you guys will actually get along, though, because I know I just met Jess for real like a week ago but I like him a lot a lot and Paris, you’re -- well, you know. I want my friends to be your friends, too. And I was kinda scared because you’re both such porcupines.”

“Porcupines?” Paris asks.

“Yeah you’re all --” Rory breaks off to giggle again and then continues. “You’re all cute and stuff but then you have all these pokey bits.”

“Quills,” Jess supplies.

“Yeah,” Rory says. “Quills. But like, when you think of quills, or when I think of quills, I think of feather pens and what porcupines have are all stabby. You are very stabby people. I don’t know why I like stabby people so much.”

“We’re more interesting,” Paris says. 

Jess isn’t sure about that, but he doesn’t say anything. By now they’ve arrived back at Rory’s dorm. Jess bids the two of them goodnight and Rory flings his arms around Jess in a drunkenly enthusiastic hug. Jess hugs him back a little slowly, ducking his head to rest his chin on Rory’s shoulder. He feels terribly aware of how slight Rory is. 

“Gnight,” Rory says, pulling away. “Get home safe, cowboy.”

“Okay, Rory,” Paris says, looping an arm through his and leading him toward the entrance. “Let’s go to bed.” 

Jess watches them go inside and it takes him a moment to convince his body to turn away and move toward his own dorm, several blocks away. Now, alone, he can finally let his thoughts unspool. He’s been trying, with admittedly limited success, to keep them contained in a corner of his mind that wouldn’t interfere with him having a nice night with a couple of friends. Now he gives up any semblance of control and lets himself be hit by the full realization that he has feelings for Rory. Already the word  _ crush  _ feels wrong and the word  _ love  _ feels like way too much way too fast but really there’s no good word for this in between thing, this other thing that consists of a desire, simple and blinding, to be where Rory is, to hear what he says, to touch him -- not even sexually, just to hold his hand, to sit with him as Paris does. Paris. He can’t even resent her because she’s been there for Rory and Rory quite clearly loves her, even if things between them aren’t perfect now. 

He walks home without thinking of where he’s going, ending up in front of his door with only the vaguest memory of having climbed the stairs. He turns the key in the lock and leans into the door to open in. Inside, his roommates are curled up together on the futon, watching, of all things,  _ I Love Lucy  _ reruns.

“Hey,” he says, moving over to the futon and kicking Peter’s foot until he scoots over enough for Jess to sit down. “Where the hell did you find this?”

“The old people channel,” Peter says. “They’re doing a 24-hour Lucille Ball marathon. It’s amazing.”

From the other end of the futon, Caleb says, “I sort of expected the channel to stop at like, 8pm. That’s when old people go to bed, right?”

“Nah,” Peter says. “They can never sleep. They might go to bed at 8 but they can never sleep so I guess they watch  _ I Love Lucy  _ all night and honestly, I get that. May we all have such good taste when we’re meandering toward death.”

“Aren’t we already meandering toward death?” Jess asks.

“Okay, dark,” Peter says. “And yeah, fine, I guess, but I mean when we’re a little closer.” He elbows Jess. “Hey, how was your night out?”

“Fine,” Jess says, eyes fixed on the screen. 

“Just fine,” Peter asks.

“It wasn’t a date,” Jess says, and immediately realizes he shouldn’t have said that. All three of his roommates have turned to look at him. “What?”

“You wanted it to be a date, didn’t you,” Peter says.

“With two people, one of whom is a woman? No, definitely not.”

“You’re totally right,” Caleb says. “He likes Rory.”

Jess almost denies this, but he doesn’t like lying to his roommates so instead he picks up the remote and mutes the TV before saying, “Okay, yeah, but none of you are allowed to be tacky about it because I only figured it out tonight so I’m still dealing with it or whatever.”

“Oh shit,” Peter says. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” he says, turning back to look at the screen where Lucy is still moving about silently. “I mean, not yet.”

“Okay,” Peter says, taking the remote from his hand. “In that case, I think the best thing for all of us, at this time and all others, is the incomparable Miz Ball.” He hits the mute button again so that the sound comes back on, and Jess is grateful that they’re aren’t making a thing of it, though he knows they’ll talk about it together when he isn’t there. He also knows that they’ll be there for him whenever he’s ready to talk, there to support him and listen to him and just be with him, as they always have been. In the flickering light of the television he watches them, arms casually slung about one other, laughing. Peter shifts his position and puts his legs over Jess’ lap, incorporating him into their human pile. Jess shrugs off his jacket and settles in, not really paying attention to the show but glad for the noise and the company while he wanders off privately in his head to wonder if Rory is in bed now, if he’s sleeping, if he’ll be hungover tomorrow morning. It’s the sort of fretting that reminds him of Luke. Luke, who only knew how to show his support of Jess’ transition by checking regularly that he wasn’t wearing his binder for too long and that he was keeping up with his T schedule, who loves people by feeding them and fixing things for them. Jess likes that about him, even if it can be a bit smothering in person. Luke is so physical, so concerned with the simplest day-to-day needs of those he cares about. They haven’t talked in awhile, but phone calls have never worked to well for either of them. Luke will ask if he’s eating enough and sleeping enough and doing his homework, and then he doesn’t really know where to go from there. He also refuses to learn how to text, so they aren’t in great touch, but whenever he goes home for a vacation or a weekend, Luke is there, the same as ever, solid and kind. 

Jess takes out his phone, knowing already that it’s too late to call Luke. He’ll call tomorrow. Maybe he’ll tell Luke about Rory. Luke’s main response to Jess’ past relationships has been “use protection” but he’s not really sure what Luke will say if he tells him he’s fallen for a boy who is not only taken but in what might be the ugly tail end of a multi-year relationship. Jess’ best guess at his uncle’s response is “get your head out of your ass,” but it might do him some good to hear that. He has no intention of letting this thing -- whatever it is -- take over his life. Somewhere in the back of his mind there’s a voice telling him that he’s never been any good at preventing any important feeling from taking over his life but for now he’s content to ignore that, settle in with his roommates, and fall asleep on the futon, fully clothed, to the sound of 1950s television. 


	4. Chapter 4

On Wednesday night, when almost everyone has left for Thanksgiving break and the campus is a ghost town, Lane sits cross-legged on Jess’ bed attempting without much success to play cat’s cradle while Jess stuffs a week’s worth of clothes and books into his carryall. Lane, who Jess hasn’t seen since Saturday before his drinks with Paris and Rory, is telling him about her date with Dave from her band.

“I think you would have been proud of me,” she says. “I didn’t freak out at all, not even when we were making out in the back of the movie theater.”

“Aw,” Jess says. “I am proud of ya.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“Only a bit. I’m glad you had a good time.”

“I did have a good time. I had a really good time.”

“So...second date?”

“Already set up for after Thanksgiving. We’re going to a concert in Boston.”

“Nice. You must have been very charming to make that happen.”

Lane doesn’t smile, just looks at him thoughtfully. “We just really like each other. We get along really well and we’re comfortable together, which I think is the case on maybe 1% of all first dates ever, and it just -- works.”

Jess looks down at his bag, feeling quite suddenly out of his depth. “I’m glad. Seriously.”

After a pause, Lane says, “So how was your thing?”   


“My thing?”

“With Rory.”

“And Paris.”

“Yeah, and Paris.”

“It was fine,” Jess says, again not looking at Lane. “Paris didn’t stab me with a butter knife which was sort of what I was expecting so we’ll count it as a success.”

“Okay.”

Now Jess looks at Lane. “What?”

“What do you mean, what?”   


“The way you said  _ okay _ .”

“What about it?”

“I dunno.” Jess shakes his head. “Never mind.”   


“I just expected you to say more.”

“Come on, man. You’ve known me for a year and a half now, you should know never to expect more than two sentences from me on any subject.”

“Except gay poets of the 1970’s.”

“Well, I have to have hard opinions on something.”   


“No hard opinions on Rory?”

Jess takes his time tightening to string around the top of his bag and setting it down before he sits on the bed next to Lane.

“I don’t know if  _ opinions  _ is the right word.”

“Okay,” Lane’s tone has shifted slightly and Jess is glad that he knows her well enough to recognize this as her listening mode.    


“I’d say. You know. Feelings.”

“Feelings.”

“Shit, man, I hate talking about this stuff, I feel like an idiot.”

“Yeah, we know, you’re very repressed. Now come on.”

“I was just looking at him, and I just had that moment, you know?”   


“I swear to god this is like pulling teeth,” Lane says, poking his arm. “What moment?”

“Like, oh, my life is sort of going to be about you for the foreseeable future.”

“The word crush would really kill you.”

“Yes, it would.”

“Okay,” Lane says. “I assume you don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why do you assume that?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because of the way this entire conversation has gone. Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Alrighty then.”

They sit together in silence and then Jess says, “Do you think he knows?”

“Hmm?”

“Rory. Do you think he knows how I feel?”

“Well, that’s hard to say given that I’ve never actually been with the two of you so I’ve never seen you interact so I don’t know how totally obvious you’re being.”

“I am not totally obvious.”

“Sure, Mystery Man.”

Jess flops back onto his bed. “Oh god, he totally knows.” 

Lane lies down, propping her head on her hand. “It’s totally possible that he hasn’t noticed. And even if he has, he’ll probably be cool about it.”

“Yeah,” Jess says. “I hate that I can’t say anything or do anything.”

“Because of Paris?”

“Yeah.”   


“So if it weren’t for Paris you’d declare your undying love today?”

“Oh my god,” Jess says, grabbing his pillow and hitting Lane with it.

Lane yanks the pillow away from him. “If it weren’t for Paris you’d ask him out?”

“Actually I’d probably be weird and cryptic about it for about six months and then say something. But I don’t like the idea that I  _ can’t  _ do anything.”

“But you really, really, can’t.”

“I know.”

“He’s taken.”

“Lane. I know. I wouldn’t. I just feel like everything is out of my hands, and I don’t like that feeling.”

“Yeah,” Lane says. She rolls over toward him and puts her head on his chest, draping an arm over his stomach. He loves Lane and he loves this comfort and he hates that for a moment he had wished she was Rory. 

**

Jess takes the bus to Stars Hollow, Lane waving him off at the station before going back to campus. She never goes home for the shorter breaks. The bus ride is relatively short and entirely familiar, as Jess goes back not only for holidays but quite often for weekends as well. He misses Luke but more than that, he misses not being at college, misses the absence of partiers, the sense that people here are just going about their lives, steady and ordinary, not trying to cram a lifetime of experience into four years. It makes him wonder if these people think they die emotionally as soon as they graduate. Maybe they do. After all, most of his classmates are going into finance and tech and for him, at least, that would be a death sentence.

He gets to Stars Hollow in the late evening. Even though the bus stop is only a few blocks from the diner and Jess certainly knows his way home, Luke is there to meet him and pull him into a bear hug as soon as he steps off the bus. 

“Hey, kid.”

“Hey, Luke.”

They begin to walk toward the diner. “How were midterms?”

Jess shrugs. “I showed up.”

“You know, there are people out there who would kill to get the grades you do without studying.”

“I study a bit. I study enough.”

“Enough for you.”   


“Whatever, it’s not hard. How’s the diner?”   


“Same as always. I met a crazy lady the other day.”

“This town is full of crazy ladies.”

“This one was extra crazy. I’m not sure if she’s so crazy once she’s had her caffeine for the day, but she was definitely crazy before it. She gave me a horoscope.”

“A horoscope?’

“Yeah,” Luke says, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket. “I’ve got it right here.”

“You have a horoscope in your wallet that a crazy lady gave you?”

“Yeah, she said it’d bring me luck.”

“This town is rubbing off on you.”

“She wrote: today you will meet an annoying woman. Give her coffee and she’ll go away.”

“Did it work?”

“Did what work?”

“Giving her coffee?”

“Yeah, but she managed to be chatty during the fifteen seconds I was pouring it.”

“Hey, I’m sorry, I know how you hate chatty customers.”

“She was stopping in town on her way to Yale, actually. Her kid goes there.”

“Please tell me you didn’t give her my name.”

“Of course not, I’m not an idiot. I mentioned nothing about anyone I knew going to Yale. I just said that was very impressive and the kid must be very smart.”

“Good.”

“Anyway, that’s the most interesting thing that’s happened to me in a week.”

“I love how boring your life is.”

“You hate how boring my life is.”

“No, no, I love it, it’s right for you.”

“You know, if you still want that property to start a bookstore, that does actually mean coming back to this town and living here.”

“I know.”   


“And you don’t think you’ll be bored?”   


“I’m never bored. I mean, I’m always bored. I mean, there’s no place that could make me less bored than I always am, and the things that save me from boredom work anywhere.”

“Books?”   


“And music.”   


“You’re a weird kid.”

“Nah, I just have ADHD.”

They’re back at the diner now and Jess takes the familiar steps two at a time to leave his bag in his room before going back down for the late meal that Luke is making them. Before he goes back down the stairs, he pulls out his phone to check for messages. There’s a text from Rory and he feels a quick jump in his heart as he reads the name. 

_ I think my mom met your uncle?? He owns a diner in Stars Hollow CT, right? _

Jess replies with a single question mark and then goes down to the kitchen. He and Luke eat standing next to the stove, though Luke draws the line at Jess actually just spearing fries directly from the deep fat fryer with a fork. 

“It’s not like I’d be putting my fork in the oil,” Jess says. “Just into the basket.”   


“It’s not dignified.” 

“Like any of this is dignified,” Jess says, wiping some mustard from his chin with the back of his hand. 

“Put some on your plate like an adult.”

They eat for a time and then Luke says, “How are your folks up at school? Lane and the guys?”   


Jess nods. “They’re good. Lane had a date last weekend.”

“Hey, that’s big for her, right?”   


“Yeah.”   


“Well I’m happy for her. Tell her I’m happy for her.”

“She might think that’s weird.”

“She knows me, it won’t be weird.”

“Tell her yourself, I’m sure she’ll be back some weekend soon enough and if it’s all still going well she’ll definitely tell you about it.”

“Alright, alright. How about you?”   


“What about me?”

“Anyone -- you know -- special?”

Jess shrugs and takes a bite, aware that Luke is watching him. Finally, he says, “I met a boy. But it’s nothing, we’re just friends, nothing can happen. There’s a girlfriend.”

“So does the girlfriend mean nothing can happen ever because he’s straight or --” 

Jess shakes his head. “He’s bi. But -- when I met him it was kind of because he was crying on me about the girlfriend so things with the girlfriend are a mess but that also means that if -- when -- they break up I’ll feel completely gross if I go after him and also I’m sort of friends with the girlfriend now so the whole thing is messy. It’s not anything.”

“If it wasn’t anything you wouldn’t have started with  _ I met a boy _ .”

Jess lets out a frustrated sigh. He and Luke have an old deal that they have to be honest with one another, even though neither of them are really talkers. They’ve worked for the closeness they have and sometimes Jess just has to remind himself of that and grit his teeth and say what he doesn’t want to say. 

“What I’m feeling isn’t nothing, that’s why I said it. But nothing’s going to happen.”

“Alright,” Luke says. “He’s your friend, though?”   


“Yeah,” Jess says. “He’s my friend.”

Later that night, when he’s getting ready for bed, Jess checks his phone and sees another text from Rory. 

_ My mom came to campus to pick me up yesterday. We’re travelling around the East Coast for Thanksgiving break to visit friends. Tonight we were planning out all our coffee stops - as one does - and she said we should stop in Stars Hollow at some point because she drove through on her way to get me and she had great coffee there at a diner called Luke’s! That’s your uncle, right? Crazy small world :) _

Jess stares at the text for a moment, then replies,  _ Did your mother possibly give my uncle a weird horoscope to get her coffee more quickly? _

He watches the screen of his phone as he brushes his teeth and grabs it when it lights up. 

_ Yeah….I guess he remembers her! _

Jess texts back:  _ He definitely does. Come by for coffee and stay a while if you want -- I can show you around town.  _

He slips his phone back into his pocket, spits into the sink and rinses his mouth. When he steps back into the main room, Luke is pulling back the covers on his bed. 

“So the crazy lady with the horoscope, it turns out I know her kid.”

“Oh yeah?” Luke says, looking up. “How’d you figure that out?”   


“He just texted me and told me that his mother had coffee here on her way to pick him up.”

“And you asked about the horoscope?”

“I asked about the horoscope.”

“Huh,” Luke says. “Small world.”    


“They’re travelling around the East Coast during break and they’re gonna come back here.”

“I hope the mom’s already had some caffeine when they do.”

“So you’re gonna meet the kid.”

“Is he nice, or is he like you?”

“You’re hilarious.”

“Well?”

“He’s the boy.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” There’s a pause, and Jess almost wish he hadn’t said anything about it. “I just thought you should know.”   


Luke nods. “Well, I look forward to meeting him.” 

Jess goes to bed, checking his phone one last time before he does. There’s no message. He lays it face down on the bedside table, then on the shelf below the table because he knows himself well enough to know that if he sees it light up, he’ll check just in case it’s Rory, and really he just wants to get to sleep. Even with the phone out of sight, though, it takes him a while to settle himself. He’s going to see Rory before the end of break, and it’s only now that he knows that that he realizes how long a time five days had seemed not to have even a chance of seeing him. He tells himself to get a grip because he’s only known this guy a week and a half and he has a girlfriend and it’s absurd to get attached in a situation like this but no amount of argument can stop the brightening in his chest when he thinks of Rory in Stars Hollow. He rolls over, shifts the pillow under his head. He is so absolutely fucked. 

**

The next day is Thanksgiving, which means that Jess spends the day cooking upstairs while Luke frantically moves between the apartment and the diner because he insists on keeping the business open on all holidays but also on cooking a turkey and all the sides for the two of them, despite the fact that there’s no way they could possibly eat it all on their own. Jess will never be as good in the kitchen as Luke, but he was taught by Luke so he isn’t terrible. He can be trusted with the potatoes and the beans and the corn if not with the actual turkey which, truth be told, frightens him a little. 

Jess puts on a  [ Ramones ](https://open.spotify.com/album/3ToX9inehiXTv17hpaOyie?si=tbBHx2LxQPKUlpmcEQUcfg) album -- and turns it back on every time Luke, who turns it off whenever he comes up, goes back downstairs -- and goes to work peeling vegetables and mixing sauces. At two o’clock, the meal is ready and Luke puts the rest of the staff in charge for a few hours and comes upstairs to eat with Jess. They it across from each other at the narrow kitchen table, their knees knocking together, and clink their beer bottles.

“To good food,” Luke says, and they drink. 

They eat much of their meal in silence, as they often do. They’re both on their second plate before Luke says, “How are your classes shaping up this semester?”

“Fine.”

“Any good ones?”

“I dunno.”

“Do you not know because you don’t go to class?”

“You know, the great thing about college is that you can skip most of your lectures and as long as you do the reading, you’re fine.”

“Listen, Jess, I’m not really one for giving advice but -- I hope you don’t end up regretting that you had every opportunity to have a real education and you just didn’t show up to class.”

Jess shrugs. “I’m getting an education. I read like three books a week. I’m also at an institution of higher learning. Those two things are only occasionally related.”

Luke gives him a look that clearly says,  _ you are so full of shit.  _

Jess sighs and puts down his fork. “There are good classes. There are good professors. Education is worthwhile. Happy?”

“I’m not trying to --”

“The place is run by old money, you think that’s not going to seep into the intellectual life of school?”

“You sound like a college communist.”

“I am a college communist. I just wish I knew more than five others to be mockable with.”

“But there are good classes?”

“A couple. It’s the students more than anything that make me want to chloroform myself.”

Luke is silent a moment, taking a bite and a drink of beer. “But you did find your people there.”

“Huh?”

“Your five communist friends. This kid Rory. You found your people. Your people aren’t in Stars Hollow.” 

Jess moves a couple vegetables around his plate with his fork, not wanting to look at Luke. Because it’s true, his people aren’t in Stars Hollow, and he hates that. He hates, instinctively, the fact that he found people to love at a place like Yale. He wants the world to be more straightforward than this. As long as he’s been at college he’s felt like a stranger in a strange land and he wants that to mean that everyone there is too different from him to make any kind of friendship work. But that’s not how it is. There are people just like him, and there are people totally unlike him -- people like Paris -- who he likes almost in spite of himself. 

Luke, misreading Jess’ silence, says, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean you’re unwelcome here.”

Jess nods, still looking at his place, and then takes a bite, surprised by the lump in his throat when he swallows. 

They eat in silence for a while until Luke starts giving him the town news, delivered, of course, in such a style as to express that Luke learned all of this only because he has the bad fortune of having customers who talk to him and that he is relaying it to Jess only to make a point of how ridiculous it is. Later, when they’ve finished doing the dishes, Luke pulls Jess into a hug and says, “I’m glad you’re home, kid.”

Jess presses his face against Luke’s shoulder and fights the sudden urge to cry. He only lets himself cry when Luke has gone back downstairs and he’s alone. He curls up in bed and he cries himself out and then he lies there, looking out over the great expanse of the blanket, wondering why it feels like this. Eventually he reaches over to the bedside table and picks up his phone. His plan is to text Lane, but almost without thinking, he scrolls past her number and hits Rory’s instead. He lies there, staring at the screen, wondering what to write.  _ Do you ever feel like you’re a stranger everywhere? Are you miserable at Yale and miserable when you leave Yale? Do you feel like it’s impossible to actually talk to other people?  _ He sounds absurd and melodramatic even to himself. Instead he types  _ Breaks from school are so weird.  _

Almost immediately he gets a message back.  _ I know. I always feel like a time traveler.  _ A few more seconds and then:  _ Like I’m going to a place that looks and feels familiar but also everything has changed.  _

For a long moment he looks at the texts, then replies:  _ Yeah, that’s it.  _ He lets out a breath. There’s such relief in being immediately and easily understood, understood without the awful and constant strain to say what he means. 

Another text appears on the screen.  _ Hope you’re okay.  _

Jess replies  _ I’m okay _ and then,  _ Had a weird conversation with Luke. I don’t think he really gets why I’m not happy at Yale. _

There’s a longer silence from Rory this time, but then:  _ If I’m being honest, I don’t totally get why you’re not happy at Yale. But I can try to get it if you want to talk.  _

Jess doesn’t want to talk, not really. What he wants is for Rory to understand, immediately and completely. What he wants is to understand his own feelings well enough that talking about them doesn’t feel like a Herculean effort. It doesn’t seem right that all he really cares about in the world is reading and writing and yet he can’t find the right words for himself. At last he types,  _ I don’t know if I can explain it.  _ And then,  _ At least right now.  _ And then,  _ At least over text.  _ And finally:  _ But I’d like to try sometime.  _ He puts his phone face down on the bed and goes to the bathroom to wash his face and make sure it doesn’t look like he’s been crying before going downstairs to see if Luke needs any help, tucking a book into his back pocket in case there’s nothing to do and leaving the phone where it is. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next day Jess gets a text from Rory midmorning: "Just passed the 'Welcome to Stars Hollow' sign - we’ll be there in a few minutes!" It’s actually six minutes before they arrive -- Jess knows because he hovers at the counter, checking his phone every few seconds, and when did he become a guy who hovers and obsessively checks the time? But then Rory and a woman who must be his mother come through the door and immediately Jess is entirely calm. He’s calm even as Rory bounds across the diner with the kind of energy that Jess associates with dogs and small children and leans over the counter to kiss him on the cheek.

On Friday, Jess gets a text from Rory saying that he and his mother will be coming through Stars Hollow again on Sunday. He spends that day and the next so obviously antsy that Luke actually tells him to stop cleaning.

“Why?” Jess asks, looking up from the grill he’s been scrubbing at with an SOS pad.

“You’re making me nervous,” Luke says, putting down the dirty dishes he’s just brought in. “And I need to make a burger.”

“Make the burger,” Jess says, moving to the counter to wipe it down.

“You never clean,” Luke says, eyeing him even as he puts the meat on the grill.

“Sure I do.”

“Never without instructions and usually not without threats.”

“I’m feeling civic minded.”

“Join the Boy Scouts.”

“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

There’s a stain on the counter, one that Jess hasn’t seen before, which means that it’s recent, which means that he might be able to get it out. He scrubs harder.

“Jess.”

“What’s the question?”

“Why have you turned into a neat freak?”

“No reason.”

“It’s the boy.”

Jess puts down the rag. “Please don’t make me talk about this.”

Luke lifts his hands in surrender. “Fine. But seriously, you’re making me nervous. Go clean the windows upstairs.”

So Jess does. He also cleans the bathroom, sweeps and mops the floor, and dusts the light fixtures. For a moment, he thinks about what he’s always believed about tidy people being internally messy but he shakes it off and keeps scrubbing. He’s not used to anxiety and he doesn’t like it, he can’t make anything out of it other than a freakishly clean apartment. It bothers him that all this is over Rory. Being around him has never made Jess anxious before and he hates that this feeling he has -- this feeling that he already knows he can’t quash -- is changing that. It’s changing everything.

When Luke comes upstairs he stops in the doorway and blinks a couple times, but he doesn’t say anything until they’re getting ready for bed, the two of them standing outside the tiny bathroom to brush their teeth. After Luke spits out his toothpaste and rinses out his mouth, he turns to Jess and says, “You’ll talk about it if you want to, right?’

Jess nods, moving past him to step into the bathroom. That night he has to put in his earbuds and listen to Velvet Underground to get to sleep, the way he used to when he first moved from New York. It happens sometimes that he needs sound to get to sleep but he doesn’t like it, doesn’t like the feeling that he has to drown out what’s in his head to get a little peace. He rolls over and bunches the pillow up under his head. He hates feeling like this and he hates knowing that this stupid crush will probably last way longer than it should because Jess has never, ever been able to force himself to get over anyone on any kind of a schedule. His useless heart will take its own sweet time over this as it does over everything.

The next day Jess gets a text from Rory midmorning:  _ Just passed the “Welcome to Stars Hollow” sign - we’ll be there in a few minutes!  _ It’s actually six minutes before they arrive -- Jess knows because he hovers at the counter, checking his phone every few seconds, and when did he become a guy who hovers and obsessively checks the time? But then Rory and a woman who must be his mother come through the door and immediately Jess is entirely calm. He’s calm even as Rory bounds across the diner with the kind of energy that Jess associates with dogs and small children and leans over the counter to kiss him on the cheek.

“Hi,” Jess says, a little dazed.

Rory says, “Hi.”

Rory’s mother, standing behind him, waves to Jess, and Jess nods.

“Mom, this is my friend Jess. Jess, this is Lorelai.”

“Hi,” Jess says, feeling like he’s supposed to call her by name but unsure what name to use. Lorelai? Ms. Gilmore?

Luke steps out from the kitchen, holding a pot of coffee. Jess tunes out the introductions, watching Rory. Maybe he’d been wrong to worry about him, spending all that time alone with his mother during the break. Rory smiles up at his mom, leans against her for a moment as she speaks.

“Jess is going to show me around town, do you wanna come?”

Jess is deeply relieved when she says, “Nah, all I want is some coffee and a break from being in the car. I’ll stick around here, as long as they’ve still serve coffee. You still serve coffee, right?”

Luke looks down at the pot of coffee in his hand and says, “Yup.”

Lorelai sits down on a stool, drumming her hands on the counter, and Jess follows Rory back to the door and onto the street.

“So this is where your bookstore is going to be,” Rory says, stopping outside the storefront next to the diner and looking up at the papered-over windows.

“Yeah.”

“What are you going to call it?”

“Small Town Lights.”

“Like City Lights, in San Francisco,” Rory says, clapping his hands together.

“Yeah,” Jess says again, glancing at Rory before looking back at the windows. He hasn’t seen him like this before, happy and bouncy and uncomplicatedly enthusiastic.

“Do you think the people here will get it?”

Jess shrugs. He’s bothered by the question, but he doesn’t want to have an argument right now so he doesn’t say anything about it. “They will if they ask me. Which they will. This town is too friendly for its own good. Well, maybe less friendly than nosy.”

As they continue walking, Rory says, “Why do you want to move back here? I mean, why do you want to say? You don’t seem like a small town guy to me.”

“I’m not,” Jess says instinctively, but then says, “I mean, maybe I am. I dunno. I lived in New York until I was fourteen so that’s still where I think of myself as being from. But Stars Hollow is where my life started getting better. It’s where Luke is. They had fundraisers for my top surgery. Which was totally horrifying, but also. You know. So I guess it’s home now.”

“Huh,” Rory says. “So they were accepting? About your transition?”

Jess shrugs. “They weren’t perfect, but pretty much everyone came around. Luke helped. Luke was thrilled to have a nephew,” he says, grinning. “The idea of living with a fourteen-year-old girl completely stressed him out but I came out like a month after moving in and I think he was so relieved at the idea of not having to deal with boyfriends and makeup and whatever that he didn’t have any energy left over to be transphobic. I mean, jokes on him about the boyfriends because I’m gay, but, you know.”

“My mom says he’s a curmudgeon.”

“He is.”

“You’ve always made him sound so sweet.”

“He’s a sweet curmudgeon.” Jess hesitates a moment, and then says, “He was exactly who I needed. He didn’t make me talk about my feelings or try to be buddies or anything. He just gave me permission to exist without letting me self-destruct. And with gender stuff – I mean, he just wanted to do guy stuff with me. Go to baseball games – which I hate, but whatever, for Luke I’ll sit there and eat my over-priced hot dog – and work on his boat and, I dunno, sit in silence and drink beer. The gay thing only freaked him out for as long as it took him to realize that I was still the same person who would still do the whole sitting in silence with beer thing. Here, I wanna show you my favorite place in town.”

He leads Rory down the path to the bridge over the lake. Rory is silent as they walk, but when they sit down together on the bridge, feet hanging over the water which is showing the first signs of freezing over, he says, “I think my mom’s problem – with my gender, I mean – is that she thinks it has to change everything. Like now she can’t talk to me about boys or paint my nails or ask me about outfits. Which is silly because I still like boys and I still like nail polish and she never listened to what I had to say about her outfits in the first place.”

“So why don’t you tell her that?”

Rory looks at him, considering. “Because I can’t say that nothing’s changed. I mean, if I’m being honest, I can’t say that. I mean, we can talk about boys but she has to get that I like boys as a boy. And that when she’s painting my nails she’s painting a boy’s nails and that means something different. But it’s not a distinction she really gets. Like in her mind, if I still like nail polish that means that after all I really am a girl.”

Jess nods. “Cis people suck at gender.”

“No kidding.”

“I got lucky in a lot of ways. My gender is pretty straightforward.” He sees Rory starting to grin and says, “Don’t make a straight joke, I’m making a point.”

Rory just grins wider and looks away.

“Anyway, I dunno, I guess what I mean is my masculinity is always going to be different than a cis straight dude because I’m not cis and I’m not straight but still – I’m what people expect a dude to be in a lot of ways. When I came out, it felt like such a relief. Because I could stop acting, right? But you’d have to act to be like me. You’d have to act to be what people expect a girl to be or what people expect a guy to be.”

Rory nods. “Yeah.”

“But you don’t.”

“I try not to. It’s hard.”

“It’s good,” Jess says. “The way you are.”

“Aww, thanks,” Rory says, leaning over to bump his shoulder against Jess’.

They continue walking around the town, Jess pointing out various landmarks.

When they pass the schoolyard, Jess says, “That’s where I fought the quarterback. The guy was like six feet tall.”

“You’re so –“ Rory pauses.

“Tough? Brave?”

“Dumb.”

“Yeah, well, he was bigger than me and stronger than me but I had the ultimate weapon.”

“What’s that?”

“Not giving a shit if I got hurt.”

Rory goes quiet for a minute and then says, in a voice that seems forcefully bright, “So, who won?”

“The teacher broke it up before we could find out.”

They sit down together on a bench in the town square, just across the street from Luke’s.

“I think my mom is flirting with your uncle,” Rory says, looking through the window of the diner to where Lorelai is leaning across the counter, talking to Luke.

“You should tell her that’s a losing battle. Luke can’t flirt and he can’t recognize when other people do it, either. Mostly he just trips and falls into relationships.”

Rory laughs. “Well, my mom is a master flirter. By which I mean she isn’t subtle, at all. Who knows, maybe we’ll always come through here between New Haven and home.”

Jess watches as Luke refills Lorelai’s coffee cup. He looks at the closed up storefront that he hopes will one day be his, and he imagines Rory there, standing between the shelves, a book in his hand. He wonders why it’s so hard to picture Rory in Stars Hollow; from what Rory’s said about his hometown, it’s not so different from here. A bit bigger and a bit richer and a bit less strange, but it’s still a small town in Connecticut. But this is his small town, which means it’s not like anywhere else. He’d arrived here like a small bomb, a pissed off punk from the city, gay and trans and really smart under the layers of sarcasm and ADHD. He’d been everything the town didn’t know how to handle, and yet they’d accepted him. They’d accepted him because they accepted Luke and Luke made it clear that anyone who wanted to set foot in the diner had to accept Jess. They accepted Luke because they’d accepted his father before him. That’s the saving grace of small towns, Jess thinks – of really small towns. You can’t treat people like shit because inevitably at some point you’re going to have to buy your groceries from them or take your kid to their school or talk them out of giving you a parking ticket. The problem is that the whole town is perfectly willing to spit you right out if you haven’t been there a million years or have family who’s been there a million years. People still call him “the Danes boy” even though they know that’s not his last name. Here, it might as well be. But Rory isn’t – can’t be – of this place. He wants to express all this to Rory, but he’s not sure if he can make it make sense out loud, or if Rory would understand why it matters to him.

Rory checks his watch. “We should probably hit the road soon,” he says. “We want to be home in time to do a ridiculous movie marathon and still go to bed early enough that I won’t be totally dead in the morning when I drive back to Yale. But I think we’re going to have lunch here.”

“You eating at the diner?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Rory says, standing up.

Together, they walk across the street.

Rory says, “Does it feel strange to be back here?”

“I guess. Sometimes. Yeah.”

“It always feels weird for me to go home.” Rory opens the door and the bell jingles and Luke and Lorelai turn to them.

“Hey, kiddo,” Lorelai says. “See all the sights? Hit all the hot clubs?”

“Yeah, we went to a wild rave on Peach Street. Do you want to move to a table? Jess could sit with us for lunch.” He glances up at Jess, who is trying not to show that he really doesn’t want to talk to Rory’s mom, because when has he wanted to talk to anyone’s mom, ever, in his life. Rory says, “As long as you don’t have to work.”

“No,” Luke says, “he can have lunch with you guys.”

So they get a table and Jess focuses his energy on not seeming hostile because no matter what complications exist between them, he knows that Rory loves his mother and that if he acts like a jackass then Rory will hate him and if Rory hates him then he’ll just spend the rest of the semester sitting in his room eating Thai takeout in order to avoid drinking and listening to way too much Sufjan Stevens and then Peter will break into his room and drag him out into the sunlight because he knows that Sufjan Stevens is always a sign of trouble with Jess. So he needs to be nice to this woman, no matter what he thinks of her reaction to Rory’s transition, no matter how hard his kneejerk reaction against mothers is.

“So, Jess,” Lorelai says. “Rory likes you which gives me the right as his mother to be unreasonably critical of you.”

It’s the first time Jess hears Lorelai use pronouns for Rory and he takes a moment to be grateful that she’s not misgendering him, but it’s hard not to be annoyed all the same because this isn’t something she’d say about a cis son. Still, he’ll play along. “I think whatever bad influence I have on him, Paris will be there to even it out.”

Rory looks anxious and Jess wonders what he should have said instead.

Lorelai just laughs and says, “Thank god for Paris, then. Never thought I’d say that.”

“Jess is an English major too, like me and Paris.”

“You like to read, Jess? Or is this just a coasting to graduation thing?”

“He wants to run a bookstore,” Rory says, before Jess can say anything. “In the storefront next door, actually.”

“Ahh,” Lorelai says. “Coming back home after graduation.”

“Something wrong with that?” Jess asks, putting down the salt shaker he’d been using with a little more force than necessary.

“No, I just think of Yale students as going out to big careers in big cities after they graduate. But you don’t have to do that. I run an inn, I think running a business is a great thing to do with your life.”

“But it’s not what you would have done if you’d gone to Yale.”

Lorelai lets out a single “Ha!” Jess glances at Rory, who looks completely horrified, and immediately feels bad. He wonders what he should have said and what he should say now and yes, he knows it wasn’t nice but she wasn’t being nice either and now he feels like a child again, defending himself on the playground.  _ She hit me first!  _ He stuffs some fries into his mouth.

Lorelai says, “Rory’s going to be a foreign correspondent.”

Jess makes a sound of acknowledgement.

“Has he told you about that?”

He nods.

“He’s going to see the world and write about it, that’s been his dream ever since he was little.”

She goes on, telling stories about Rory when he was little, about how well he’s always done in school and how ambitious his goals have always been. And she’s not being cruel, not really, not in a way that Jess can pin down and point out, so he can’t say anything, can’t defend himself and his own simple, reasonable dream. He wants his bookstore and a nice pair of headphones and a husband and no matter how deep he digs he can’t find any more wanting than that. Maybe it’s strange that he’s so incurably full of desire when it comes to books and boys and cigarettes but so incapable of larger ambitions, but he can’t help himself and he doesn’t think it’s ever going to change.

He looks over at Rory and Rory looks completely mortified so he looks back at his plate and hopes he doesn’t seem sullen or resentful even though that’s how he’s feeling because really he doesn’t want Lorelai to hate him even if he has no idea how to make her like him. Rory had told him once that he thought Jess would get along with his mother. Now he has no idea why.

The rest of the meal goes like that, with Lorelai doing the bulk of the talking with Rory occasionally cutting in for a joke in a slightly panicked voice and Jess eating more to avoid talking than because he’s actually tasting or enjoying any of it.

Rory hangs back as his mother heads over to the car. “Listen, I’m sorry that was so weird. She really just wants me to do well and that makes her a bit overprotective sometimes.”

Jess shrugs. “It’s fine.”

“Don’t be mad.”

“I’m not mad at you.”

“Okay.”

“Seriously, I’m not mad at you, you didn’t do anything. You look anxious. You don’t have to be anxious.”

Rory shrugs. “I get anxious when people are mad at my mom, too.”

“Ah,” Jess says. “I’ll work on getting over that.”

“She wasn’t trying to be mean.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“But she sort of was.”

“Yeah.”

Rory sighs. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize for something someone else did,” Jess says. “Even if it was your mom.”

Rory nods. “Theoretically, I know that. It’s just hard sometimes. When I said earlier that I feel weird going home, it was sort of about that. I feel like I have to apologize for Yale being Yale and for me being at Yale and for – well, I guess it is feeling like I have to apologize for myself. But for stupid stuff, like for not being five years old anymore and not being a girl and not –“ He stops. “Home just makes me feel bad about myself, I guess. I feel like I can’t be myself there. But you can be you here, and I’m glad about that.”

“Yeah,” Jess says. “Mostly.” Then he thinks about what he’d thought about earlier on the bench, about how Stars Hollow had accepted him when he came here all those years ago, and says, “Yeah.” He watches Rory as Rory watches his feet. He says, “You seemed happy, though. Earlier, I mean, before lunch. You seemed happy with your mom.”

“Yeah,” Rory says. “I love Paris but having a break from her has been good. Having a break from school has been good. And we have fun, my mom and I. We have a lot of fun. It just gets – interrupted sometimes. And then I have to remind myself that it really is mostly good. She gets weird about other people. About my friends, I mean, I think it’s sort of – no one is good enough for me, or something. I don’t know. And then she starts acting like her mom but I could never tell her that because she’d get totally –”

The car honks from down the street and Rory looks up. “I gotta go,” he says. He steps forward and hugs Jess, long and hard, and Jess closes his eyes, his face pressed to Rory’s shoulder. Then Rory steps back, squeezes his arm, and takes off down the street, turning to wave as he gets in the passenger’s side of the car. Jess waves back, and watches Lorelai and Rory drive away.   
  



	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> When he gets off the bus in New Haven, he heads straight for his dorm and, given his habit of watching his shoes instead of the world around him whenever he’s on campus, he doesn’t see the figure sitting on the steps until he’s almost walking into him. It’s Rory, sitting with a book spread open on his lap.

That evening, Luke walks Jess back to the bus station. 

“Hey, you should have taken a ride back to campus with your friend.”

“Nah, I couldn’t have,” Jess says. 

Luke has gotten into the habit, over the years, of responding to this kind of statement with silence, letting the quiet between them grow until Jess volunteers more information.

“I’m pretty sure his mom hates me.”

“She spent, what, half an hour with you?”

“I don’t know, man, she just started talking about everything Rory’s going to do with his life and saying that my coming back here to start the bookstore was basically the same as moving back home after college and hey, there’s nothing wrong with that in the first place, but -- I’m not a fuckup just because I don’t want to be the next president.”

Luke is silent again, then says, “She didn’t seem like a snob.”

“She missed her shot at being a snob because she had Rory when she was sixteen so she was being pissy at me for going to Yale and not doing anything with it.”

“Maybe she was having an off day.”

“You telling me you like this woman?”

“No, I’m just saying you spent maybe half an hour with her and you -- well, you tend to assume people are attacking you.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Well, it’s true.”

“Only because people tend to be attacking me.”   


“Well, maybe if you didn’t wear the t-shirts with the swear words and the pint of hair gel and the -”

“Luke, I’m not getting into this on the last day of break.”   


Luke says, “I’m sorry about your lunch.”

“Yeah, me too.”   


On the bus, Jess sits with one knee pulled up to his chest, headphones on, hating every mile of the ride. The three weeks between the end of Thanksgiving break and the beginning of the winter holidays were hellish last year and he expects them to be hellish again this year. He’s never been able to keep up with his homework week by week, but with the pressure of finals looming over his head, he’s able to focus with a total intensity that gets him good grades but leaves him miserable and burnt out for most of the vacation. 

When he gets off the bus in New Haven, he heads straight for his dorm and, given his habit of watching his shoes instead of the world around him whenever he’s on campus, he doesn’t see the figure sitting on the steps until he’s almost walking into him. It’s Rory, sitting with a book spread open on his lap.

“Hi,” Rory says.

Jess says, “Hi.”

“I just wanted to talk to you when you got back, I had to run off in Stars Hollow and I just felt bad about the whole thing.”

Jess sits down next to him and pulls his back of cigarettes out of his pocket then thinks better of it and stuffs them back. “How long have you been sitting here? It’s fucking freezing.”

Rory shrugs. “A while.”

“Shouldn’t you be with Paris?”   


Rory lets out a sigh and says, “I think it would be easier if she didn’t make me happy. These days I feel like every minute I spend with her, either she’s making me unhappy or she’s making me happy and that makes a voice in the back of my head remind me that the whole thing is unsustainable.”

“You guys should talk it out. Get it over with.”

Rory looks out across the quad and bites his lip. “I know we should, but I don’t know how and even if I did -- it’s like when your alarm goes off in the morning and you hit the snooze button knowing that you’re gonna have to get up eventually anyway and you’re not actually doing yourself or your body or your brain any favors by sleeping five more minutes but you can’t help it.”

“So you’re just hitting snooze on breaking up with your girlfriend.”

“I guess.”

Jess thinks he’s too tired for this, too drained by the return to this place that is somehow always worse than he remembered it. “Rory,” he says. “What are you doing here?”

Rory shrugs. “I just wanted to see you.” 

“You’ve seen me. I’m here.”

Rory looks like he’s about to cry and Jess wonders how many times in one day he has to sit there, wondering what he’s done. 

“Why are you mad at me?” Rory asks.

“I’m not, I’m just -- I’m tired and I hate coming back to Yale and your mom hates me and you came to my dorm apparently to avoid your girlfriend more than anything else and --”

“Why don’t you use her name?”

“To avoid Paris --”

“No, I meant it, I was asking why. You did it before. She’s your friend now too, isn’t she?”   


“Yeah, she is.” He thinks for a moment. He knows he can’t say that it’s because he’s making a point, which is that you probably shouldn’t go running to the guy who’s into you because you don’t want to talk to the person you’re actually dating. “Just -- I feel like I have to remind you. Break up with her if you want to, but if you don’t, then you shouldn’t sit on someone else’s doorstep because you can’t face talking to her.”

Rory gets up, tucking his book under his arm as angrily as a person can tuck a book under their arm. “Fine. I’ll see you around.”

Jess picks up his carry-all and swings it back over his shoulder and takes the stairs two at a time up to his room. Peter shuffles out into the common room at the sound of the door banging open. 

“Woah,” he says. “Hey. Who pissed you off?”

“No one,” Jess says, and goes into his room, slamming the door behind him and throwing his bag across the room. He stands there for a moment, catching his breath from the walk up the stairs, then turns around and goes back out into the common room. Peter is still standing there, staring at Jess’ door.

“I’m close to what, maybe ten people in the world, right? Because I can deal with the weirdness and quirks and neurosis of maybe ten people which is a fair exchange because they have to deal with me and I know -- I know -- I’m not the easiest friend to have. I should know by now never to talk to anyone new because I end up in a fights and I don’t even know what they’re about. It’s like you’re sitting at the dinner table with someone and you pass them the butter and they slap you in the face because apparently you’re speaking totally different languages.”

“I’m like, super lost.”

“Rory’s pissed at me because I told him to talk to his girlfriend.”

Peter squints at him. “I think there’s probably more to the situation than that.”

“There’s not.”   


“I mean there’s probably a lot of stuff going on in his head and his life that makes this more complicated than it looks to you.”

“That’s my point! I’ve got my ten people and I should just stick with that because I don’t know what’s going on with him.”

Peter gives Jess a look like he’s terribly sorry for him, which just makes Jess angrier. “Text him,” Peter says. “Tell him you didn’t mean to upset him. If you don’t, then I’ll just steal your phone and call him and tell him you’re kind of a moron when it comes to making new friends.”   


“Fine,” Jess says. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Peter says, and turns to go back into his room. “Take a while to cool off first, okay?”

“Fine, dad.”

He leans against the doorframe and closes his eyes. He doesn’t understand how the physical space of Yale can tire him out so immediately, but it does. In one pocket he’s got his cell phone and in the other a pack of cigarettes and that’s all he really needs right now so he slips back out of the dorm room and takes the stairs up to the roof where he has to unlock the door with a key he stole from the guard’s office his first week in this dorm. His freshman year he’d had a top floor room and had been able, not without considerable risk to life and limb, to climb out of his window and up onto the roof. This year, he hadn’t been willing to face life at Yale without the solace of sitting out on the roof at night.

Looking out over the campus in the growing darkness, he smokes a cigarette and wonders why people don’t say what they mean. At the end of the day, he doesn’t fully understand the source or Rory’s pain or why it manifests the way it does, why he’ll cry on Jess’ shoulder and then get angry when Jess states what seems to him like a plain and obvious truth. He takes out his cell phone and starts to type.  _ I don’t really understand what happened tonight. I wasn’t trying to be mean, but I know that sometimes I say things without realizing how they sound. I should say that I meant what I said. I don’t it’s okay for you to string Paris along. But I also know that you love her and this is hard and there’s other stuff going on in your life and sometimes it’s just too much. You don’t have to deal with it all at once. I’m sorry.  _

He stays up on the roof until it’s too cold for him to stand it. There’s no reply to his text.

**

The next day he hears someone calling his name and turns around to see Rory sprinting across the grass toward him.

“Hey,” he says, when Rory comes to a panting stop in front of him.

“Hey,” Rory says. “You on your way to class?"

“Unfortunately.”

“Can I walk with you? I’m done for the day.”

“Okay,” Jess says, wary. He never got a reply. 

Together they begin to walk and Rory says, “Thanks for your text last night.”

Jess expects him to go on, to say something about Paris or his mom or the vacation, but he doesn’t. So Jess says, “Yeah, I just felt bad that I’d upset you and I didn’t want us to be in a fight, you know? I missed you over break.”

“I missed you too. I was wondering if you wanted to study together sometime this week, with finals coming up.”

“I usually don’t really start studying until reading week.”

“You know, it still makes me so mad that you get good grades.”

Jess shrugs. There are few things he’s less comfortable talking about than his study habits. 

“During reading week then,” Rory goes on. “We can get tons of coffee and study til we drop.”

“I don’t drink coffee.”

“You’ll be dropping before me, then.”

“I’ll take that as a challenge. I think I could stay awake longer than you even without caffeine.”

“Challenge accepted.”

“Paris coming along?” For a moment Jess regrets asking, wondering if Paris is going to be a sore subject between them from now on. 

But Rory seems to be diligently pretending that their fight never happened and says, “No, Paris got into this super secret study group that I’m not even supposed to know about. It’s like the Skull & Bones Society but for people who would have a stroke if they got an A- on a term paper.”

“Sounds fun.”

Rory sighs. “She gets really weird during reading weeks when she’s spending a bunch of time with them. I mean she’s always pretty weird but it just amps up. She once got mad at me for look at her notes for a class I wasn’t even taking. Said it was intellectual property theft and if I ever took the class and wound up using anything I’d read she’d rat me out to the dean.”

“Yikes.”

“Yeah. Anyway, I could always use a study buddy who isn’t Paris.”

“I refuse to call myself a study buddy.”

“Why?”   


“Because it makes me sound like a third grader.”

“Fine. Partner in binge-reading.”

“Whatever. This is my building.”

“I’ll text you, okay?”   


“Okay.”

Their study date, as Rory calls it, is set for the Saturday at the beginning of reading week, and while he had suggested they start at 8, Jess manages to talk him down to 10. Jess shows up at two minutes past the hour with a full backpack and an armload of books to find Rory already seated at the library table they’d agreed on. It’s on the first floor, which isn’t a quiet zone, and Jess is grateful because he definitely won’t make it through a full day of studying with Rory without antagonizing him a bit. 

“Those all for you?” He asks, looking at the tray of four coffee cups sitting in the middle of the table.

“Yep,” Rory says, reaching out for one of them and taking a swig. “Good morning.”

“Morning,” Jess says. “You know what that stuff does to you in large quantities?”

“Well, I figure something’s gonna kill me.”

Given how often Jess uses that logic himself, he can’t really argue with it. Instead he takes a seat and says, “It’s the world’s most normalized addiction.”

“Yeah, my mom stuck me with it. What’s your excuse for the cigarettes?”

“I stole my first pack from a really shitty boyfriend of my mom’s and I’ve never kicked a habit in my life.”   


Rory looks chastened and goes back to highlighting sections of his notes. 

“God,” Jess says looking at the clear plastic case of writing utensils that sits atop the pile of books in front of Rory. “How many highlighters did you bring?”

“Well I have a pretty complex color-coding system and I have to bring backups of each color, of course, in case any of them run out.”

“Of course.”

Rory squints at him. “You’re making fun of me.”

“You’re an easy target, man.”

They settle into their work and Jess is relieved to find that this is one of his good days. He can read and take in the words, he can remember what he’s read, he can tune out everything else and focus completely. Time moves quickly and smoothly and all Jess wants is to hold onto this stability of mind until the end of finals. He’s taken his meds but he knows he’s also gotten lucky, and he can only hope it lasts. 

His focus only breaks when something jabs him hard between the eyes. He looks up, blinking, to see that Rory has leaned across the table and poked him with one of his highlighters.

Rory smiles. “I said your name a couple times but you were in deep. It’s lunch time, we should go get some food.”

“Yeah,” Jess says, putting down his book. He’s still shaking off his trance-like reading state when they leave the library, their bags safely stowed in lockers. 

As they walk toward the nearest cafeteria, Rory says, “You were really focused on whatever you were reading. With what you’ve said about the kind of student you are I was sort of expecting you to be chewing your pencil and doodling in the margins the whole time.”

“Wait, so am I doodling with my mouth? If I’m chewing my pencil at the same time?”

Rory lets out an exaggerated sigh and Jess looks away, grinning. “All I meant was, I was surprised by how not distracted you were.”

“Focus comes and goes. It’s either all there or all gone.”

“Well, I’m glad it’s here today.”

“Me too. Pills help.”

“Hey, isn’t that cheating on the who can stay up longest challenge?”

Jess rolls his eyes. “Okay, first, if taking prescription medication is cheating but four cups of coffee isn’t, then this bet is completely absurd. And second, no, if you have ADHD then you don’t speed on Adderall, you just gain the ability to think in a straight line.”

“Oh,” Rory says, his voice gone soft and quiet. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not mad. I’m just telling you something.”

He worries about Rory sometimes, the way he shrinks when he thinks anyone is angry at him. Jess isn’t sure if it’s just a strategy Rory uses to get out of trouble or the result of some kind of trauma, and so he feels bad for being annoyed by it. One day he’ll ask, but this isn’t the right time and they aren’t close enough and Jess isn’t sure he wants to know just yet. 

In the cafeteria, they get their food and go to a corner table. It’s the first day of reading week so most people are sitting in silence, books and binders laid out in front of them or frantically typing on laptops, but Jess had talked Rory into leaving all his materials at the library so they’re taking a real break instead of studying through their meal like most people do.

“So, what are your plans over break?” Rory asks as they sit down.

“I’m gonna wash this school right outta my hair.”

“Other than that?”

“I’ll sleep and read and convince Luke that he doesn’t need to call my mom if she doesn’t call him and then I’ll sleep some more and then we’ll do round two where I convince Luke that I don’t need to call my mom either and then we’ll set off some firecrackers in a vacant lot and drink whiskey at midnight to ring in the new year.”

“No traveling?”   


“Nope.”

“The firecrackers sound fun.”

“If you ever really want to feel alive you should try shooting bottle rockets off while actually holding the bottle.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“Not if you hold the bottle away from yourself.”

Rory gives him a mildly horrified look. “Please don’t die before school starts again.”

Jess shrugs. “I don’t do that so much anymore. But Luke caught me one year and we made it a tradition to set off fireworks together with, you know, some mild degree of caution. Luke was good at that, taking self-destructive shit I did and turning it into something good that we could do together.” Jess thinks,  _ I’m glad you didn’t meet me when I was seventeen.  _ But he doesn’t say it. “So what are you doing over break?”

“I’m going to Paris’ Hanukkah party which is always a bit surreal between the elderly relatives who corner me to tell me stories about what Paris was like when Paris was four years old --”

“What was Paris like when she was four years old?”

“Incredibly into documentaries about watchmaking, apparently. Anyway, there’s that and then I’ll have Christmas dinner with my grandparents, but New Years’ is just me and my mom. Other than that it’s mostly binge-watching and eating junk food with her on the couch. Sometimes we’ll make a trip to New York. Maybe we’ll stop by in Stars Hollow.”

“I’m not sure your mom wants to see me. Ever again.”

“She likes Luke, though. She can go in for coffee and we can meet up somewhere else and you two never have to cross paths.”

“You’ve thought about this.”

“A bit.”

Back at the library, they settle back into their work. Rory sees Jess underlining something with his ballpoint pen and asks if he wants to borrow a highlighter. “That way you can use different colors for different themes.”

“Nah,” Jess says. “You clearly have barely enough for yourself.”

Rory gives him a look.

“Seriously, I prefer pen. I write in the margins and I don’t like having to switch writing utensils all the time.”

“Suit yourself.”

They work until dinner and then return again for the evening. Jess is working through a stack of critical articles on themes of early 20th century American poetry, a semester’s worth of weekly assignments that have been accumulating in his folder for the past three months. Truth be told, he prefers to read them all at once. This way he’s better able to see all the connections between them and hold them in his head until exams and essays are all finished and he can let go.

Jess finishes the article he’s on and looks up, ready to start the next one, to see Rory with his read resting on the pages of the book he’s been reading, his breath slow and even. He flips his phone over. It’s nearly four in the morning. Quietly he begins to pack up his things, then moves over to Rory’s side of the desk. He taps Rory lightly on the shoulder, but there’s no response. If he were stronger and it was a less theatrical gesture, he’d carry Rory out of the library, still sleeping, to his dorm. What’s so heartbreaking, Jess wonders, about shaking a sleeping boy into wakefulness? Somehow, he manages it.

Rory sits up, groggy but startled. “What time is it?” He asks, the words slurring together. 

“Late,” Jess says. “Bedtime. Close to four.”

“Oh, no,” Rory says. “You won the bet.”

“Yep. Come on, let’s get you home.”

Rory packs up his bag, still grumbling, and together they walk out of the library and into the lamplit darkness of the campus at night. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from a song by Bad Suns. The song is totally unrelated to the fic, I just like the name.  
> Shoutout to uma @umusings for being my proofreader!


End file.
